A Plasmonic Gold Nanostar Theranostic Probe for In Vivo Tumor Imaging and Photothermal Therapy.

Melodi Javid Whitley, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Dermatology
Assistant Program Director for Trainee Research
Director of Transplant Dermatology

I am a physician scientist focused on the dermatologic care of solid organ transplant recipients.  Clinically, I manage the the complex dermatologic side effects of immunosuppression with a focus on high-risk skin cancer.  My research focuses on understanding the drivers of cutaneous malignancy in this population using translational approaches.

Dr. Vaidyanathan is a professor in the Department of Radiology.  He is a member of the Nuclear Medicine track of the Medical Physics Graduate Program.  His research involves development of radiopharmaceuticals especially for oncologic applications.  Some of the projects he is involved in are given below.

I.          New methods of radiohalogenating antibodies and its variants 

a) Development of newer residualizing agents for the radiohalogenation of internalizing monoclonal antibodies.

b)  Development of fluorine-18 labeled residualizing agents for labeling nanobodies.

c) Pre-targeting approach via bioorthogonal chemistry for in vivo labeling of antibodies and nanobodies with ¹⁸F and ²¹¹At.

d)  Methods to label antibodies pre-conjugated with a prosthetic group of the tin precursor of residualizing agents.

e) Multimodal prosthetic groups for labeling antibodies and peptides with multiple radioisotopes.

II.         MIBG Analogs for PET imaging

Radioiodinated MIBG is used in the diagnosis of the pathophysiology of the heart as well as neuroendocrine tumors such as neuroblastoma (NB).  Design and development of newer fluorine-18 labeled MIBG analogues useful in the PET imaging of NB as well as that of myocardial diseases.

III. Noninvasive Imaging of Alkylguanine-DNA alkyltransferase (AGT) 

AGT is a DNA repair protein and is primarily responsible for drug resistance in alkylator chemotherapy. An inverse correlation has been established between the tumor AGT content and the therapeutic outcome. The amount of AGT varies from tumor to tumor and within a group of patients of similar cancer. Thus, it is important to quantify tumor AGT of individual patients before administering alkylator chemotherapy. Our goal is to develop radiolabeled agents with which AGT can be quantified in a noninvasive manner by PET or SPECT imaging. 

IV. PSMA targeting for prostate cancer therapy 

Development of At-211 labeled urea-based inhibitor of Prostate-specific membrane antigen.

• Our lab's research focus lies primarily in developing novel quantitative imaging systems, reconstruction algorithms and analysis methods.  My major expertise is in preclinical CT.
• Currently, we are particularly interested in developing novel strategies for spectral CT imaging using nanoparticle-based contrast agents for theranostics (i.e. therapy and diagnostics).
• We are also engaged in developing new approaches for multidimensional CT image reconstruction suitable to address difficult undersampling cases in cardiac and spectral CT (dual energy and photon counting) using compressed sensing and/or deep learning.

• We are involved in co-clinical cancer trials and I serve as the Principal Investigator on the U24 Duke Preclinical Research Resources for Quantitative Imaging Biomarkers part of the NCI Co-Clinical Imaging Research Resources Program network (CIRP).