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Organisers
Bertrand Tavitian, CEA, France
Frédéric Ducongé, CEA, France
Andreas Jacobs, Cologne, Germany
Patrick Cumi, Evry, France
Eva Pebay-Peroula, Grenoble, France 
Silvio Aime, Turin, Italy
Introduction
Since the 1990s, progress made by physicists and chemists has provided a wealth of nano-scaled tools predicted to have a large impact on life sciences and particularly on cancer treatment. Formal definitions of nanotechnological devices typically feature the requirements that the device itself be man-made and in the 1100 nm range (similar to large biological macromolecules). Such nanoparticles are already extensively exploited in vitro to achieve fundamental understanding of biological processes or disease diagnostic. In medicine, nanodevices offer important new possibilities, both for high contrast agents and therapeutic payloads. In vivo clinical applications of nano-objects are just beginning but their potential seems to be high and many efforts are provided to build and functionalized these nano-objects in order to achieve long circulation time, good biocompatibility and low immunogenicity, efficient penetration of physiological barriers, selective targeting, external activation or self regulating drug release... However, despite the appealing applications of nanotechnologies their use in vivo raises the question of the precise distribution and elimination pathways, as well as the toxicity associated with nano-scaled objects.
Imaging modalities: To address limitations of in vitro assays, in vivo imaging of vertebrates has emergedas a powerful tool used in virtually all forms of modern biomedical research and drug discovery. Significant progress has been made towards non-invasive imaging of animals, from the embryonic stage to fully developed adult stage. One approach has been the adaptation of clinical imaging methods to the animal dimensions for obtaining optimal imaging characteristics in the smaller volumes examined. A second trait has been the evolution or development of new methods, primarily based on photonic technologies, which are well suited for small animal research. Animal imaging can significantly accelerate biomedical discovery by enabling expeditious tests of agents, drugs and hypotheses. Imaging can be pivotal for example in accelerating drug discovery or the identification of potent diagnostic agents by utilising the animal as the test bed in the pre-clinical in vivo assessment of treatment efficiency, targeting sensitivity and specificity, bio-distribution and long term effects. Molecular imaging techniques are particularly efficient to assess non-invasively the pharmacokinetics of drug candidates. Typically all the standard radiological imaging modalities have been used for molecular imaging, except X-ray, that does not up to this point offer sufficient sensitivity. Femtomolar sensitive, whole body techniques such as positron emission tomography (PET) are used to test the delivery of drugs and explore dynamically molecular events in “real time” in intact organisms. The low spatial resolution of PET is ideally completed by in vivo subcellular imaging approaches using fibered confocal microscope technology which can document uptake distribution and penetration of fluorescently-labelled molecules at the cellular level. These techniques are increasingly applied to explore in living animals the distribution of nanomolecules and nanovectors.
Given the importance that nano-objects are likely to take in molecular medicine, it appears timely to combine the expertise in the analysis of distribution of large objects in vivo with the expertise in the fabrication and functionalization of these objects.
Created by the European Society for Molecular Imaging, TOPIM stands for “hot TOPics in molecular IMaging”. The idea behind TOPIM is to fill the gap between classical meetings, open to all but that usually present already published data, and prospective meetings that concern small circles of experts and out of which stem only general ideas or recommendations. TOPIM carries a strong educational motivation, a large participation of students and young scientists, and concentrates on a field of research at the interface between in vivo imaging and new fields of science. TOPIM ’07, the first conference of this kind, held on February 19-23, 2007, on the hot topic: “Imaging in neuroinflammation” was a great success. The participants agreed that TOPIM should be reconducted in a similar format, i.e. sufficient time for free discussions and no publication of abstracts so as not to interfere with the presentation of unpublished data.
The TOPIM ’08 workshop proposes to address the use of in vivo molecular imaging during the conception of new nano-objects. The aim is to stimulate strong exchanges between physicists, chemists and biologists, and to summarize 1-the conception, the functionalization and the physico-chemical properties of different nanoparticles, 2the possibilities for in vivo imaging of nano-objects, and 3-the description of different applications in the field of therapeutic and in vivo diagnostics.
Programme outline: Nano-objects with interesting physico-chemical properties for in vivo applications will be presented, i.e. Quantum dots, carbon nanotubes, polymeric nano-sized lipidic rings, gold and diamond nanoparticles…, with focus on their in vivo applications, in particular the techniques and means by which they can be functionalized for imaging.
The programme can be downloaded as a pdf file here.
Venue
The meeting will be held in Les Houches, France. For more details please go to the workshop website.
Registration
Registration is now closed.
The list of speakers can be downloaded as a pdf file here.
