title: Bioimaging of nanoparticles: the crucial role of discriminating nanoparticles from free probes.
abstract: The biological fate of nanocarriers has yet to be fully explored, mainly because of the lack of functional tools like probes to identify integral nanocarriers in the body. Understanding their in vivo fate remains as the bottleneck to the development of nanomedicines. Bioimaging results based on conventional fluorescent or radioactive probes should be judged critically because images merely reflect bulk signals of an admixture of the nanoparticles and free probes. It is crucial to discriminate between nanocarrier-bound and free signals. This review analyzes the state-of-the-art of bioimaging of nanoparticles in vivo and highlights directions for future endeavours.
authors.affiliation: School of Pharmacy, Fudan University, Key Laboratory of Smart Drug Delivery of MOE and PLA, Shanghai, China; School of Pharmacy, China Pharmaceutical University, Nanjing, China.
authors.forename: Xiongwei
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.affiliation: School of Pharmacy, Fudan University, Key Laboratory of Smart Drug Delivery of MOE and PLA, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Xiaochun
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Dong
authors.affiliation: School of Pharmacy, Fudan University, Key Laboratory of Smart Drug Delivery of MOE and PLA, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Yi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.affiliation: School of Pharmacy, Fudan University, Key Laboratory of Smart Drug Delivery of MOE and PLA, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Jianping
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Qi
authors.affiliation: School of Pharmacy, Fudan University, Key Laboratory of Smart Drug Delivery of MOE and PLA, Shanghai, China; Key Laboratory for Special Functional Materials of the Ministry of Education, Henan University, Kaifeng, China.
authors.forename: Weili
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: School of Pharmacy, Fudan University, Key Laboratory of Smart Drug Delivery of MOE and PLA, Shanghai, China. Electronic address: wuwei@shmu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Wu
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D003952:Diagnostic Imaging; D005456:Fluorescent Dyes; D053758:Nanoparticles
chemical_list: D005456:Fluorescent Dyes