Imaging Life with Light and Sound: State-of-the-art Photoacoustic Imaging For Mechanistic Understanding Of Human Disease

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Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) involves shining a particular type of light into the body and then detecting sound waves coming out of the body. This can provide pictures showing the structure of organs, how they are working, and what certain molecules are doing in the body. PAI is safe and can look relatively deep into the body. It is important to be able to study how organs work in the body, what is happening in disease, in a living subject, rather than "in a dish" which does not reflect so well what happens in the body.We will use the most advanced PAI system commercially available to study heart, cardiovascular and brain disease and cancer in experimental models. PAI can be used to study organs such as the heart and the brain in living subjects, to see if organs are working properly, e,g., is the heart beating properly, is a blood vessel blocked, is blood flowing properly in the brain, is enough oxygen being delivered to the brain, etc. We can also use PAI to see if there is disease anywhere in the body, e,g., cancer. PAI can be used to see particular molecules that are changed when there is disease, e.g., the abnormal protein clumps in the brain in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Disease. Sometimes molecules have to be tagged to be seen by PAI, and in this project, we will invent new tags/probes to see molecules we think are involved in causing disease. Disease can also be caused by certain cells not working properly and we can also tag these cells so that we can use PAI to see where they are and what they are doing. Sometimes drugs are delivered by specially made tiny particles or even in safe virus particles, and these can also be tagged so that we can see where drugs are being delivered by PAI. Using PAI we will get detailed pictures of what happens during human disease so that we can identify harmful molecules or cells that are important in causing disease and develop new drugs that will target these molecules and cells.