Department of Radiology, The Methodist Hospital Research Institute, Houston, USA
Biography
In an effort to devise schemes to site-specifically deliver drugs “on demand” we have leveraged the inducible expression properties of the well-characterized class of stress-response factors, the heat shock proteins. We asked whether a small molecule ligand selective for such proteins could be used as a potential theranostic platform. By conjugating a fluorescent dye to a recently identified nucleoside analog with modest affinity for heat shock protein 70 (HSP70), we have found that cellular uptake can be enhanced following transient heat shock in vitro
