Tymish Ohulchanskyy

Since near-infrared (NIR) light has been found to penetrate deeper into biological tissues than the visible one, NIR optical bioimaging has rapidly emerging and developing into a powerful yet feasible biomedical imaging technique, which allows for imaging guided surgery and drug delivery. NIR nanoprobes that provide an optical imaging contrast can also be equipped with conventional clinical  imaging modalities (e.g., computed tomography, CT, and magnetic resonance imaging, MRI), resulting in an establishment of a single nanoplatform for multiple medicinal imaging techniques, which allows for the obtaining of a complementary information on cellular, tissue and whole body levels. On the other hand, NIR spectral region can be beneficial for phototherapy (e.g., photodynamic and photothermal therapies, PDT and PTT), due to the deeper penetration of light activating phototherapeutic agents to treat diseased tissues.  Combination of PDT and/or PTT with other therapeutic modalities has been shown to result in synergistically enhanced and localized treatment of cancer in in vitro and in vivo models with minimal adverse effects. Consequently, biocompatible nanoparticles that comprise multimodal imaging and phototherapetic modalities provide a phototheranostic nanoplatform that can be employed to selectively target cancer and other diseases. The already low systemic toxicity of biocompatible nanotherapeutics for cancer diagnosis and treatment can be further diminished by a development of nanoplatforms that produce therapeutic action in response to the tumor microenvironment (TME) or external stimuli. This talk will present our recent results on development of heterogeneous photoactive biocompatible nanoformulations for NIR phototheranostics that includes NIR imaging and light induced therapy. The developed nanoplatforms include nanoliposomes, protein nanocrystals, thermoresponsive polymeric nanoparticles and silica-based magnetoplasmonic nanoparticles. The nanocarriers can be loaded with NIR fluorescent dyes and other functional small molecules, including chemotherapeutics and PDT and/or PTT agents, and activated with external stimuli or TME. The talk will demonstrate examples of applications of the developed nanoparticles as multimodal imaging guided, multifaceted therapeutics agents to treat cancer and other diseases; it will conclude with a discussion on the opportunities and challenges in the domain of near infrared phototheranostics.

Tymish Y. Ohulchanskyy holds a Ph.D. in Optics and Laser Physics from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine).  In 2001, he joined the University at Buffalo as a postdoctoral associate in the Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics (ILPB), where he later became a principal investigator and the ILPB deputy director. Since 2016, Dr. Ohulchanskyy is a distinguished professor in the College of Physics and Optoelectronic Engineering at Shenzhen University (Shenzhen, China). Dr.Ohulchanskyy’s research broadly involves photochemistry and photophysics of organic molecules and organic, inorganic and hybrid nanostructures, applications of optical spectroscopy/microscopy and optical/multimodal imaging in biomedical field as well as various aspects of photobiology. He has published around 180 peer-reviewed articles cited more than 19000 times (h-index is 61, according to Google Scholar). Dr. Ohulchanskyy is a Senior Member of the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE).

• Time: 11:00 AM
• Location: 206 Furnas Hall