CONTEXT

Today, cancer treatment constitutes both health and economic problems since million people are affected. Cancer is the second cause of mortality after cardiovascular diseases. Therapy success in terms of increasing life expectancy depends on the diagnosis precocity and the tumor stage. Detection of sentinel nodes, which get lymphatic drainage from tumor, is the object of important developments. Indeed the first node detection is an important step of prognosis since a positive diagnosis will lead to the total excision of the lymphatic nodes chain.

In order to detect lymph nodes, medical teams inject radioactive colloids or a biocompatible dye. Detection is then carried out by visual inspection or gamma probes, which are limited imagery methods in terms of precision and resolution.  Thus there is a real need of developing new strategies that carry out non nuclear detection and imagery methods with high resolution. The invention is related to biocompatible nanosystems with magnetic, optic and mechanic properties, constituting a new method of sentinel node detection.