Dr. Weibo Cai Awarded 2012 EANM Eckert & Ziegler Abstract Award

Posted on July 2012

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Weibo Cai, Assistant Professor in Imaging Sciences, and Principal Investigator of the Molecular Imaging and Nanotechnology Labratory, won the 2012 European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) Eckert & Ziegler Abstract Award. This is the first year that the Molecular Imaging and Nanotechnology laboratory submitted abstracts to the EANM Annual Congress. Both of the abstracts were selected as oral presentations.

The winning abstract was entitled “In Vivo Targeting and Imaging of Tumor Vasculature with Radiolabeled, Antibody-Conjugated Nano-Graphene.” This study demonstrated first that nano-graphene oxide can be specifically directed to the tumor in vivo. The versatile chemistry of graphene-based nanomaterials makes them suitable nanoplatforms for future biomedical research, such as cancer theranostics. Since the paper first came out in February 2012 in ACS Nano, it has attracted a lot of attention. It was highlighted in Chemical & Engineering News, Nanoscale, and Springer Publishing also invited Dr. Cai to edit a book on a related topic.

This work on nano-graphene was in collaboration with Dr. Zhuang Liu at Soochow University, a long term collaborator of Dr. Cai. In 2007, together they reported the first in vivo tumor targeting and imaging of single-walled carbon nanotubes in Nature Nanotechnology.