Novel probes for imaging of tumor-associated cathepsins via Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and fluorescence microscopy
Organisation: University of Lisbon, Portugal
Supervisor: Prof. Rui Moreira
Co-supervisors: Prof. Maria M. M. Santos and Prof. Filipe Elvas
Hello! My name is Oliviero Cini and I am from Pisa, Italy. I did my Master in “Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Technology” at the University of Pisa and now I am a PhD student of MSCA Doctoral Network OncoProTools at the University of Lisbon. The main focus of my PhD research is to synthesize, develop and evaluate cathepsin B and L inhibitors, which will then be used for the design of probes for theranostic applications. Cathepsins are critical players in many physiological and pathological processes and they are also implicated in almost every stage of tumor progression, including tumorigenesis, proliferation, invasion, angiogenesis, and metastasis. For these reasons they represent promising biomarkers for cancer diagnostic. Thus, developing selective cathepsin inhibitors with a linker that allows the connection to different type of cargos, as diagnostic and therapeutic radionuclides, will allow to obtain efficient imaging probes, which represent an appropriate tool for molecular imaging and an interesting biomarker for tumor detection and treatment.
