Surface engineering and multimodal imaging of multistage delivery vectors in metastatic breast cancer

The design of effective nanoformulations that target metastatic breast cancers is challenging due to a lack of competent imaging and image analysis protocols that can capture the interactions between the injected nanoparticles and metastatic lesions. Here, we describe the integration of in vivo whole-body PET-CT with high temporal resolution, ex vivo whole-organ optical imaging and high spatial resolution confocal microscopy to deconstruct the trafficking of injectable nanoparticle generators encapsulated with polymeric doxorubicin (iNPG-pDox) in pulmonary metastases of triple-negative breast cancer. We describe the details of image acquisition and analysis in a step-wise manner along with the development of a mouse model for metastatic breast cancer. The methods described herein can be easily adapted to any nanoparticle or disease model, allowing a standardized pipeline for in vivo preclinical studies that focus on delineating nanoparticle kinetics and interactions within metastases.