Glutathione-Responsive T1 Contrast Agent for Tumor Imaging

Tumor microenvironment responsive probe holds great potential to achieve precise diagnosis owning to its capacity to show different signal in tumor and normal tissue. Here, we develop an intelligent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast agent (CA) with the capacity to rapidly respond to GSH. This intelligent MRI CA keep in “off” state in normal tissue while degrade into manganese ions and exhibit “on” state in tumor lesion. This unique feature endows this activable MRI CA to fulfill accurate tumor detection. Besides, this intelligent CA show negligible cytotoxicity to cell and mice, indicating its excellent biocompatibility and immense potential to biological application. This work develops a new activable MRI CA to sensitively detect tumor and provides guidelines to design new activable MRI CA for precise diagnosis.