Datta Group

Chemical Biology & Molecular Imaging

Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India

             Our group is interested in visualizing biomarkers to facilitate early disease detection and to unravel molecular mechanisms underlying disease onset. The modus operandi will be designing and synthesizing near infra-red and magnetic resonance imaging probes to track biomarkers non-invasively in living systems.

            

             One of the biggest challenges of molecular imaging is to detect nano- to micro- molar concentrations of biomarkers in vivo. Imaging techniques with the requisite high sensitivity currently rely on optical or radiation based modalities. Optical imaging in the UV and visible wavelengths suffer from very low depth penetration and hence are currently unsuitable for imaging most living systems. The vision is to not only understand disease onset mechanisms in vivo but also to bring the field of molecular imaging to clinics so that its applications are directly useful to the practitioners. Hence we have to detect biomolecules with clinically viable, radiation free techniques such as magnetic resonance (MR) and near infra-red (NIR) imaging.

 

             We use our chemistry acumen to incorporate selectivity and ‘turn-on’ features in MRI, NIR and multimodal probes which will improve sensitivity. Our group is particularly interested in biomarkers such a metal ions, phospholipids and certain enzymes that have been difficult to visualize in vivo using current imaging probes. In developing the imaging probes we synthesize or engineer small molecule organics, metal complexes, nano-conjugates and modified proteins each with a targeted application. These probes are characterized for their specificity and finally, optical and magnetic resonance techniques are used for both in vitro and in vivo imaging.