PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Alejandra Hernandez Pichardo
AU  - James Littlewood
AU  - Arthur Taylor
AU  - Bettina Wilm
AU  - Raphaël Lévy
AU  - Patricia Murray
TI  - Computed tomography lacks sensitivity to image gold labelled mesenchymal stromal cells in vivo as evidenced by multispectral optoacoustic tomography
AID  - 10.1101/2022.06.15.495483
DP  - 2022 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2022.06.15.495483
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/06/15/2022.06.15.495483.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/06/15/2022.06.15.495483.full
AB  - Elucidating the mechanisms of action and long-term safety of cell therapies is necessary for their clinical translation. Non-invasive imaging technologies such as bioluminescence imaging (BLI), computed tomography (CT) and multispectral optoacoustic tomography (MSOT) have been proposed as tools for longitudinal cell monitoring but their performances have not been compared. Here, we evaluate combinations of these modalities to track the in vivo distribution of gold-labelled mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs). We found that injected MSCs labelled with gold nanoparticles and expressing the reporter gene firefly luciferase could be detected with BLI and MSOT but not CT. We conclude that the MSCs did not carry enough contrast agent to be tracked by CT, demonstrating that CT tracking of gold-labelled cells is not a practical approach as high amounts of gold, which might impair cell viability, are necessary.Competing Interest StatementJames Littlewood works at iThera Medical GmBh.