Discover the inner workings of cancer

(Scientists look for new ways to fight cancer often endeavor to understand subtle changes, often invisible to DNA, proteins, cells and The tissue affects the body's normal biological condition and causes disease.

Now to support that battle, a team of researchers has developed a new sophisticated optical imaging method that allows scientists to look deep into tumors and discover activity. slide inside these tumors.

In the trials that will be described at Frontiers at Pptics (FiO), the annual optical science meeting, Dai Fukumura and his colleagues will present a new optical imaging technique for monitoring. the movement of molecules, cells and liquids inside tumors; check the abnormality of the blood vessel network within them; and observe how these tumors are affected by the treatment.

A previous tumor (left) and five days later (right)

These techniques, built by Fukumura and his long-term collaborators at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, combine two different high-tech optical imaging methods ordered to serve. this study.

One of the two technologies known as MPLSM ( multiphoton laser-microscopy) , is a superior fluorescence imaging technique that has now been commercialized on the microscope market. The second type is called OFDI (Optical frequency domain imagin ), giving tissue images using optical dispersion properties. According to Fukumura, OFDI is gaining popularity in the field of optical imaging but has not yet been commercialized.

'MPLSM overcomes many of the drawbacks that microscopes and confocal microscopes encounter, and OFDI provides clear, large-capacity image data,' Fukumura said.

Fukumura will present their research at FiO 2013, taking place on October 6-10 in Orlando, Fla. There, he will describe how his unique technology can show the inside and outside images of tumors, and show detailed pictures of growing tumors - those images that he and his colleagues call 'horror'.

Fukumura adds, while this new combined approach will be too expensive for users for everyday diagnostic purposes, it promises to help researchers better understand complex operations. , and puzzling about human cancer, supporting cancer treatments. ' These optical image approaches can provide an unprecedented insight into the biology and mechanism of cancer , ' he said.