M.Sc. Outi Keinänen will defend her Ph.D. thesis titled Pretargeted PET imaging of porous silicon nanoparticles and monoclonal antibodies – Development of 18F-fluoroglycosylated tetrazine tracer for the IEDDA reaction in vivo tomorrow October 5th, 2018. The opponent is Prof. Frank Wuest of University of Alberta, Canada. Outi's Ph.D. thesis has been prepared over the years 2013–2017 at the University of Helsinki under the supervision of Associate Prof. Anu J. Airaksinen and Academy Research Fellow Mirkka Sarparanta, at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (visit to the lab of Prof. Albert D. Windhorst) and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA (visit to the lab of Prof. Jason S. Lewis). She is a student at the Doctoral Programme of Chemistry and Molecular Sciences (CHEMS-DP). In her Ph.D., Outi has developed new high specific-activity 18F-radiolabeled tetrazine tracers through fluoroglycosylation for the bioorthogonal inverse electron-demand Diels-Alder (IEDDA) cycloaddition reaction, and employed her tracer to the pretargeted PET imaging of porous silicon nanoparticles for drug delivery and the internalizing antibodies cetuximab and trastuzumab in mouse models of cancer. Outi has continued her academic career as a postdoctoral researcher at the lab of Prof. Brian Zeglis at Hunter College, the City University of New York.
Outi's Ph.D. thesis can be found at the E-thesis repository.