Focuses on the convergence in these rapidly evolving areas, spanning from basic biology to clinical diagnostics and therapeutic applications. This multidisciplinary topical meeting will highlight recent advances in these rapidly evolving areas with a goal of stimulating novel strategies for molecular probe development, site-specific drug delivery, monitoring treatment response and clinical translation to improve diagnosis or treatment of diseases. Areas to be covered include, but are not limited to, novel molecular probe design, applications of smart molecular probes in basic and applied research, endogenous and exogenous optical molecular biomarkers, multimodal imaging, advances in instrumentation and algorithms for optical molecular imaging, molecular and functional imaging of normal and diseased tissue, image-guided drug delivery, drug screening and monitoring therapeutic response.