Event
Bioengineering Seminar Series: Kristine Glunde
Friday, December 3, 2010
11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Room 2108, Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Bldg.
Professor Yu Chen
yuchen@umd.edu
Kristine Glunde
Associate Professor
Department of Radiology and Oncology
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Novel Hypoxia-driven Molecular Imaging Biomarkers in the Breast Tumor Microenvironment
Advances in molecular biology and multi-modal molecular imaging techniques have created molecular-functional imaging capabilities that are finding applications in basic, preclinical, and translational breast cancer research. This talk will highlight recent advances in preclinical multi-modal molecular imaging that combines molecular biology, optical imaging, magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging, and mass spectrometric imaging. Hypoxia is one of the hallmarks of tumors, and triggers multiple signaling cascades that significantly impact upon biological outcomes including angiogenesis, selection for resistance to apoptosis, resistance to radiation and chemotherapy, and increased invasion and metastasis. Hypoxic tumor regions that arise from inadequate blood supply of tumors have a heterogeneous spatial distribution. Understanding and characterizing the hypoxic response of tumors is therefore critically important and requires approaches that can evaluate the complexity as well as the spatial distribution of the hypoxic response. Combined Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopic Imaging (MRSI), optical imaging, and Mass Spectrometric Imaging (MSI) approaches will be presented that can unravel hypoxia-driven signaling pathways in the breast tumor microenvironment. Metabolic alterations that characterize hypoxic tumor regions can serve as imaging biomarkers of tumor hypoxia and aggressiveness. One focus of this talk will be the extracellular matrix formed in breast tumors by the Collagen I matrix. Second harmonic generation (SHG) microscopic imaging demonstrated that hypoxic tumor regions contained fewer and less dense Collagen I fibers than normoxic regions. Collagen I fibers in breast tumors form important avenues along which breast cancer cells migrate to form metastases.
