Joint ViSE and BME Seminar: Ultrasound Therapy and Imaging: Applications in Brain Drug Delivery and Pancreatic Cancer Treatment, SC 5326, Tuesday January 27th, 12:15. Refreshments provided.
Title: Ultrasound Therapy and Imaging: Applications in Brain Drug Delivery and Pancreatic Cancer Treatment
Speaker: Hong Chen, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Scientist, Columbia University, Department of Biomedical Engineering
Date: Tuesday, January 27th
Time: 12:15-1:10 pm, lunch available
Location: Stevenson Center 5326
Abstract: Ultrasound, one of the most widely used medical imaging modalities, is currently being developed as a noninvasive, targeted therapeutic technique that has incredible potential to transform the treatment of a variety of diseases. Combining imaging and therapy, ultrasound provides a platform technology that is applicable to diagnose disease, deliver targeted therapy, and monitor the response to therapy. It has a large and growing number of clinical applications that are in various stages of research, development, and commercialization. This talk will focus on two promising applications: (1) focused ultrasound in combination with microbubbles for noninvasive and localized brain drug delivery and (2) ultrasound image-guided high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) treatment of pancreatic cancer.
Brain diseases are difficult to treat due to the presence of the blood-brain barrier. Focused ultrasound in combination with microbubbles is so far the only available technique for noninvasive, targeted, and reversible blood-brain barrier opening. This talk will discuss potential physical mechanisms for how ultrasound-activated microbubbles disrupt the vascular barrier and present techniques that use low-energy focused ultrasound in combination with microbubbles for brain drug delivery. Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest types of cancer. It is characterized by the presence of the stromal barrier, impeding drug diffusion from the blood into the tumor. This talk will introduce an all ultrasound-based system that uniquely integrates radiation force-based elasticity imaging with HIFU for pancreatic tumor detection and non-invasive HIFU thermal ablation treatment as well as monitoring. It will also present an ultrasound image-guided pulsed-HIFU technique for inducing bubbles in mouse pancreatic tumors to enhance chemotherapeutic drug penetration by mechanically disrupting the stromal barrier.
Speaker Biosketch: Dr. Hong Chen is a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Columbia University. She has a long-lasting research interest in medical ultrasound. She received her Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Washington in 2011 under the supervision of Drs. Lawrence Crum and Thomas Matula. Her thesis work focused on understanding how ultrasound-activated microbubbles disrupt the vascular barrier. After graduation, she worked with Dr. Joo Ha Hwang in the School of Medicine at the University of Washington as a senior fellow for one year and focused on developing pulsed-HIFU technique for pancreatic tumor drug delivery. Since 2012, she has been working with Prof. Elisa Konofagou at the Columbia University on focused ultrasound-enhanced brain drug delivery and elasticity imaging for pancreatic tumor detection and HIFU ablation monitoring. She has published 12 first-author peer-reviewed articles, 3 second-author peer-reviewed articles, 1 book chapter, and 10 conference proceeding papers. She received the RWB Stephen’s prize at the World Congress in Ultrasonics/Ultrasonics International (2005). She also received the Student Paper Award from IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium (2008), the highest student paper award in the field of ultrasound. Recently, she obtained the Young Investigator Award at the International Focused Ultrasound Symposium (2014).