UCI Researchers Receive $555K National Institutes Of Health Grant To Support New Fluorescence Technique That Analyzes Tumor Tissue Biomarkers

A UCI research team led by Weian Zhao, PhD, Professor at the UC Irvine School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences and Enrico Gratton, PhD, UCI Professor of Biomedical Engineering, received $555K from the National Institutes of Health to support the development of a new fluorescence technique based on highly parallel hyperspectral and lifetime imaging for spatial protein profiling. This technique has the potential to study multiple types of tumor tissue biomarkers in patient tissues in a single experiment. 

“In cancer treatment, for example, many drugs only work in a small subset of patients because of the complexity of tumor biology,” says Zhao. “By revealing cellular spatial organization and interactions in the tumor tissue using this new technology, physicians will be better informed to prescribe the right drugs to the patients to improve clinical outcome.”

This new highly multiplexing technology overcomes several major challenges found in current methods that suffer from either low multiplexing or complexity.

“The ability to profile biology in 3D spatial context can provide new insights into systems biology and help develop precision companion diagnostics for stratified patient care,” says Zhao.