Naomi Matsuura

Research Synopsis

Professor Matsuura’s Medical Imaging Materials Laboratory specializes in designing new materials that interact strongly and specifically with imaging radiation.

A major application of such materials is their use towards guiding personalized treatment of cancer for individual patients. These new materials, in the form of injectable colloids, may be remotely activated using medical imaging sources to facilitate the minimally-invasive, image-guided, local and site-specific delivery of cancer therapies to tumours in vivo, even to organs that are typically difficult to treat using systemic drug therapies (e.g., the brain).

Recently, her group has also developed a new biocompatible and clinically translatable nanoscale agent for radiosensitization of hypoxic tumours.

Her research program spans across multiple disciplines; from synthetic chemistry to physicochemical characterization, preclinical evaluation in vivo, and commercialization, with the eventual goal of clinical translation in partnership with clinical collaborators.