Seminar: Photoacoustic monitoring of a nanobubble-enhanced radiation treatment to understand the effects of delayed nanobubble stimulation and subsequent delayed radiation delivery (For students, faculty & staff only)

Who can attend: Open to Graduate students, faculty, staff, adjunct faculty, post-docs.

Student: Helen Melino
Supervisor: Dr. Michael Kolios
Abstract

While tumour cell death is a goal of radiation therapy, it can be challenging to limit the radiation-induced effects to the tumour microenvironment (TME). Over the past 15 years, researchers have developed a combination of localized ultrasound (US) stimulation of lipid-shelled microbubbles (MBs) followed by radiation, as both treatments have been shown to induce endothelial cell dysfunction, ultimately leading to tumour cell death. This combination has increased the effectiveness of radiation therapy by 10-fold in vitro and is currently being used in clinical trials. Despite this success, the size of MBs (~1-8μm) limits their therapeutic effects to the vasculature. To overcome this, the current work proposes nanobubbles (NBs) as an alternative to MBs, as their small size (<600 nm) enables extravasation from the vasculature into the TME.