Fluorescent Sensors of Protein Kinases: From Basics to Biomedical Applications - Progress in Molecular Biology and Translational Science - page 265

5.4. Looking toward the future Biomedical imaging for

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diagnostics
Visualizing the activities of protein kinases in disease such as cancer and
metastasis can provide insights into its pathogenesis while also providing a
means for early detection of target dysregulation. Fluorescent biosensors un-
questionably constitute one of the most promising classes of tools for detec-
tion of biomarkers in situ , as they allow circumventing the biopsy and
extraction required for traditional ex vivo detection of biomarkers using an-
tigenic approaches.
While the perspective of developing diagnostics through molecular
imaging may still seem far-fetched, advances in fluorescence imaging tech-
nologies, associated with ongoing developments in medical devices for
whole-animal and patient imaging, are paving the way toward this possibil-
ity. Moreover, together with the development of novel synthetic probes and
smart chemical biology approaches, new generations of molecular tracers
and fluorescent biosensors are being proposed to report on disease bio-
markers. The concomitant development of nanocarriers and nanoparticles
that are suited to introduce these fluorescent probes in vivo is now providing
new opportunities to “illuminate disease” through molecular imaging. Fluo-
rescent imaging technology can easily be combined with endoscopy or
tomographic optical imaging methods, thereby raising expectations for
the application of fluorescent biosensors to detect target dysfunction or
hyperactivation in vivo in diseased tissues, tumors, or metastatic cancer cells.
Finally, this approach can potentially be applied to monitor response to
therapeutics and thereby develop a theragnostic approach allowing the de-
termination of the status of a given biomarker over time while administrat-
ing a drug and assessing the benefits of treatment.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Research in M.C. Morris group is supported by the CNRS (Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique) and grants from the Association de Recherche contre le Cancer
(ARC), the Region Languedoc-Roussillon (Subvention “Chercheuse d'Avenir”), and the
Institut National du Cancer (INCA). N. V. T. N. is supported by a fellowship from USTH.

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