LANthanide ANTENna: development of responsive two-photon bioprobes for in depth near infra-red imaging applications. – LANTEN

The LANTEN project at the interface of chemistry, physics and biology, aims to design new lanthanide luminescent bioprobes (LLB) for two-photon (2P) microscopy bioimaging and simultaneously explores unprecedented diagnostic applications. The main originality of these probes is to target new biological transparency windows in the NIR (900-1300 nm) enabling in depth imaging.
Three work-packages are envisaged:
(WP1) the new 2P-LLBs will be designed to combine both two-photon absorption and optimized emission in the NIR spectral range, and fully characterized using advanced nonlinear spectroscopy techniques. The potential of these 2P-LLBs for 2P-microscopy bioimaging will then be evaluated in diffusive media, model of thick tissues then in cellulo and finally in vivo using zebrafish embryos. (WP2) The best NIR-2P-LLBs will then be functionalized by a reacting functionality enabling a specific encoding via peptide bioconjugation for cell internalization and organelle targeting. The main objective is to establish the proof-of-concept of tumour detection directly implemented in zebrafish embryo using NIR-2P-microscopy.
(WP3) Finally, responsive NIR-antenna will be developed to be also sensitive to endogenous analytes acting as stimuli and fully characterized using nonlinear spectroscopy and in cellulo microscopy.
The LANTEN project is based on a competitive consortium that combines the complementary skills required to overcome the challenges that represent (i) the synthesis of such advanced molecular probes as well as (ii) the intrinsic instrumental difficulties of NIR spectroscopy and microscopy. Overall, the final objective of the project is to provide new preclinical tools for in vivo diagnostic that will open up new perspectives for industrial applications in biology or medicine.