Lora Yuge Liu: Development of Targeted Therapy for the Treatment of Glioblastoma

Current treatments can slow disease progression but are rarely curative,highlighting the need for new approaches that improve the delivery of therapeutic agents to tumourtissue.This project investigates heptamethine cyanine dyes (HMCDs) as tumour-targeting carriers for thedevelopment of drug-dye conjugates.

These near-infrared fluorescent molecules are of interestbecause of their reported preferential accumulation in several brain tumour types and their potential tocombine tumour targeting with optical imaging 2 . A modular synthetic strategy has been developed toattach different therapeutic molecules to a cyanine dye scaffold, allowing the preparation ofconjugates with different structures and drug-loading patterns.The resulting compounds are characterised using analytical and spectroscopic techniques andevaluated in glioblastoma cell models to investigate their cellular uptake and biological activity.Computational approaches are also being used to support the design and interpretation of selectedconjugates.