Engineering near-infrared (NIR) active liposomes to establish a systematic method to monitor and quantify the location of encapsulated anticancer drugs in the body and their release at tumor sites.

• Design novel thermosensitive liposomes with dextran coating and test the hypothesis that they have enhanced performance in vivo compared to their PEG-coated counterpart
• Engineer near-infrared fluorescence active liposomes by integrating indocyanine green (ICG) into liposomes and then quantify the in vitro encapsulation and release of doxorubicin by the NIR imaging at different temperatures
• Study in vivo pharmaokinetics and biodistribution of such delivery systems by whole body NIR imaging.