7th Scientific Meeting

The seventh scientific meeting of NanoDiaRA took place in Tallinn, Estonia. It was organised by the group of Prof. Agu Tamm, University of Tartu, in collaboration with NanoDiaRA’s scientific coordination MatSearch. 35 principal investigators, trainees and collaborators from the 15 partner institutions attended this important strategic meeting to establish the work plan for the last six months of the project. The participants concentrated on preparing tasks and timelines to integrate the progress achieved in the various sub-projects towards a final successful scientific and innovative outcome of the NanoDiaRA project. Besides the high scientific outcome, the project group also had the opportunity to meet with their colleagues and network intensively between young and principal investigators in the beautiful setting of the historic town of Tallinn which welcomed us with wonderful weather.

The translational research project NanoDiaRA has developed – in the laboratory and commercially – different iron oxide nanoparticles (SPION) for use in vivo as highly specific targeted contrast agents, with and without peptide ligand and antibody coatings, to achieve early diagnosis of joint inflammation and active cartilage breakdown; also for in vitro use in multiplex immunoassays permitting measurement of very low concentrations of disease markers in very small volumes of body fluids. Both approaches are designed to detect joint disease at its very early stage so that therapy can be applied with greater effectiveness. The project aims to translate knowledge from the various research and application fields into the development, characterisation and pre-clinical testing of iron oxide nanoparticles in preparation for subsequent commercial development. The last three years of research and development have shown that it requires a very interactive consortium of researchers, engineers and clinically experienced experts to translate nanoparticle knowledge to a clinical application. Methods of in vitro and in vivo assessment of particles had either to be newly developed or adapted to the requirements of the reliable laboratory synthesis of nanoparticles with translation into a possible commercial production. The follow-up characterization had to take all necessary safety aspects into account, especially regarding contact with blood and immune cells so to allow magnet resonance imaging (MRI) with higher specificity. Additional improvement of the contrast and special segmentation tools help to quantify the outcome of such diagnostics measurements.

The NanoDiaRA project ends in the beginning of 2014, and major technical hurdles have now been overcome. They had appeared because of the complexity of this innovative project which breaks totally new ground. Preliminary results with in vivo joint imaging are now extremely promising.

The next and last NanoDiaRA project meeting will take place in Lisbon, Portugal, in November 2013. There, the progress made in summer and fall of 2013, as well as the overall outcome of the project, will be presented. The project will then be evaluated by the European Commission. This meeting will be combined with a two day conference which is organized in collaboration with FP7 project NANOFOL.