Friday, 25 March 11:00am – 12:00pm

This seminar will be delivered in Online Zoom Please email chemistry.researchsupport@sydney.edu.au for zoom link and password.

Speaker: A/Prof. Zachary Hudson; University of British Columbia (Canada)

Host: A/Prof. Markus Muellner

Title: Luminescent Polymer Nanoparticles for Diagnostics and Imaging

Abstract: Smartphones are now ubiquitous, and are more common than clean drinking water in some developing countries and remote communities. Where healthcare resources are limited, there is a need for diagnostic tools that are both inexpensive and readily available. Fluorescent polymer nanoparticles – termed polymer dots, or Pdots, have recently been shown to have sufficient brightness to be visible by a smartphone camera for fluoresence-based assays. In this lecture, the design and synthesis of new multifunctional Pdot probes for use in bioanalysis as diagnostic tools will be described. Pdots with near-infrared fluorescence capable of selective binding to breast cancer cells suitable for imaging in the biological transparency window (650 – 1350 nm) will be demonstrated. New Pdot technologies taing advantage of thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) for time-gated imaging will also be described, allowing one to eliminate background fluorescence from biological tissues or secondary dyes. We will also show how single-chain polymer nanoparticles (SCPNs) can be used to give Pdots that can deliver a targeted drug payload with high specificity. Deep-red fluorescent polymer dots functionalized with a cell-penetrating peptide mimic will also be described, capable of entering a variety of mammalian cells with low cytotoxicity for time-gated imaging. Finally, we will demonstrate how commercial smartphones can be adapted for Pdot-based bioanalysis, with the goal of improving the accessibility of complex healthcare tools in rural and developing communities.

Biography: Zachary M. Hudson is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Chemistry at the University of British Columbia. Zac completed his B.Sc. at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

He remained at Queen’s to pursue a Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry focusing on the development of luminescent materials for organic electronics. During his Ph.D. he also held graduate fellowships at Jilin University in China as well as Nagoya University in Japan.

He carried out postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Bristol and the University of California, Santa Barbara before joining the faculty at UBC in 2015. He leads a research program in synthetic materials chemistry, studying topics ranging from solutions for energy-efficient displays and light sources to the self-assembly of electronic materials on the nanoscale. He was the recipient of the CSC Emerging Materials Investigator and ACS Polymer Science and Engineering Young Investigator awards in 2020. Most recently, he was given the Herman F. Mark Young Scholar award from the ACS for distinguished contributions to polymer science.