Industrial Scale-up and Prototype Evaluation of Biologically Benign Surface Functinalized Silicon Nanocrystals.

量子点（QDs）有望彻底改变医疗诊断和治疗，并对广泛的消费产品产生重大影响，因为它们具有可定制的尺寸依赖的光学和化学反应。不幸的是，大多数市售量子点含有有毒金属（如镉、铅或铟），严重限制了它们的市场范围。硅纳米晶体（sic）是一种不含金属的量子点，具有其含有毒金属对应物的所有有利特性，并具有元素丰度和生物相容性的额外好处。尽管碳纳米管有明显的优势，但很少有方便的可扩展的方法来生产它们，而且商业上可用的材料的有限例子质量很差。本提案要求资金用于：i)优化材料生产和性能（即增加该制备方法的规模，优化功能化方法以最大限度地提高SiNC与水/生物介质的相容性，优化和演示表面交换反应的范围，提高光致发光），演示应用（即MR成像，发光成像），同时直接将SiNC性能与关键竞争技术进行比较；并准备应用/规范文件，以促进商业化。

Quantum dots (QDs) are poised to revolutionize medical diagnostics and treatments and have a substantial impact on a wide range of consumer products because of their tailorable size-dependent optical and chemical response. Unfortunately most commercially available QDs contain toxic metals (e.g., cadmium, lead, or indium) that severely limit their market reach. Silicon nanocrystals (SiNCs) are metal-free QDs that possess all of the favorable properties of their toxic metal containing counterparts with the added benefits of elemental abundance, biologically compatibility. Despite the obvious advantages of SiNCs there are few convenient scalable methods for their production and the limited examples of commercially available materials are of poor quality. This proposal requests funds to: i) optimize material production and properties (i.e., increase the scale of this preparative method, optimize functionalization methods to maximize compatibility of SiNCs with water/biological media, optimize and demonstrate the scope of surface exchange reactions, improve photoluminescence), demonstrate applications (i.e., MR imaging, luminescence imaging) while directly comparing SiNC performance with that of key competing technologies, and prepare application/specification documents that will facilitate commercialization.