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In many cancers early intervention involves surgical resection of small localised tumour masses. Inadequate resection leads to recurrence whereas overzealous treatment can lead to organ damage. This work describes production of a HER2 targeting antibody Fab fragment dual conjugated to achieve both real time near-infrared fluorescent imaging and photodynamic therapy. The use of fluorescence emission from a NIR-dye could be used to guide resection of tumour bulk, for example during endoscopic diagnosis for oesophago-gastric adenocarcinoma, this would then be followed by activation of the photodynamic therapeutic agent to destroy untreated localised areas of cancer infiltration and tumour infiltrated lymph nodes. This theranostic agent was prepared from the Fab fragment of trastuzumab initially by functional disulfide re-bridging and site-specific click reaction of a NIR-dye. This was followed by further reaction with a novel pre-activated form of the photosensitiser chlorin e6 with the exposed fragments’ lysine residues. Specific binding of the theranostic agent was observed in vitro with a HER2 positive cell line and cellular near-infrared fluorescence was observed with flow cytometry. Specific photo-activity of the conjugates when exposed to laser light was observed with HER2 positive but not HER2 negative cell lines in vitro, this selectivity was not seen with the unconjugated drug. This theranostic agent demonstrates that two different photo-active functions can be coupled to the same antibody fragment with little interference to their independent activities.

In the framework of the conjectured duality relation between large $N$ gauge theory and supergravity the spectra of masses in large $N$ gauge theory can be determined by solving certain eigenvalue problems in supergravity. In this paper we study the eigenmass problem given by Witten as a possible approximation for masses in QCD without supersymmetry. We place a particular emphasis on the treatment of the horizon and related boundary conditions. We construct exact expressions for the analytic expansions of the wave functions both at the horizon and at infinity and show that requiring smoothness at the horizon and normalizability gives a well defined eigenvalue problem. We show for example that there are no smooth solutions with vanishing derivative at the horizon. The mass eigenvalues up to $m^{2}=1000$ corresponding to smooth normalizable wave functions are presented. We comment on the relation of our work with the results found in a recent paper by Cs\'aki et al., hep-th/9806021, which addresses the same problem., Comment: 20 pages,Latex,3 figs,psfig.tex, added refs., minor changes

We consider the metric space of all toric Kähler metrics on a compact toric manifold; when “looking at it from infinity” (following Gromov), we obtain the tangent cone at infinity, which is parametrized by equivalence classes of complete geodesics. In the present paper, we study the associated limit for the family of metrics on the toric variety, its quantization, and degeneration of generic divisors. ¶ The limits of the corresponding Kähler polarizations become degenerate along the Lagrangian fibration defined by the moment map. This allows us to interpolate continuously between geometric quantizations in the holomorphic and real polarizations and show that the monomial holomorphic sections of the prequantum bundle converge to Dirac delta distributions supported on Bohr-Sommerfeld fibers. ¶ In the second part, we use these families of toric metric degenerations to study the limit of compact hypersurface amoebas and show that in Legendre transformed variables they are described by tropical amoebas. We believe that our approach gives a different, complementary, perspective on the relation between complex algebraic geometry and tropical geometry.