BME Seminar: Summer Gibbs
Monday, February 26, 2024 - 12:00 p.m.
Summer Gibbs, PhD
Professor, Biomedical Engineering
Knight Cancer Institute
Oregon Health & Science University
"Near Infrared Contrast Agents to Improve Clinical Medicine"
Keating 103
Zoom link | Password: BearDown
Hosts: Dr. Mario Romero-Ortega and Dr. Shang Song
(Instructor permission required for enrolled students to attend via Zoom)
Persons with a disability may request a reasonable accommodation by contacting the Disability Resource Center at 621-3268 (V/TTY).
Abstract: Fluorescence guided surgery (FGS) is a nascent field, however with ~15,000 clinical FGSsystem distributed worldwide, its potential to specifically highlight tissues to be resected (e.g., cancer)and avoided (e.g., nerves) has been recognized and there are >125 ongoing clinical trials with novelcontrast agents to leverage this clinical imaging technology. Latrogenic nerve damage is arguably one of the most feared surgical complications as nerve injury is often permanent leaving patients with pain, loss of function and disability. Near infrared (NIR) nerve-specific contrast agent(s) that are spectrally matched to the existing clinical FGS infrastructure have a direct path to clinical translation with broad surgical applicability. However, development of NIR nerve-specific probes has been asubstantial challenge as these probes must be small enough to cross the tight blood nerve barrier, but have a sufficient degree of conjugation (i.e., double bounds, which by definition increase themolecular weight) to reach NIR wave lengths. Through a directed fluorophore medicinal chemistry approach, we have designed and developed first-in-kind, small molecule NIR nerve-specific fluorophores. Our team is currently working towards clinical translation of our novel probes as we explore the utility of nerve imaging for a variety of surgical indications including prostatectomy, neurosurgery, endocrine surgeries, head and neck surgeries and orthopedic indications.
Bio: Dr. Gibbs has >20 years of experience in the field of in vivo fluorescence imaging with expertisein fluorescent contrast agent development and its clinical translation. She completed her PhD in biomedical engineering under the direction of Brian Pogue, PhD at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College in 2008. She joined Dr. John Frangioni’s Laboratory where she completed three years of postdoctoral training and was promoted to instructor in medicine. She joined the faculty in the Biomedical Engineering Department at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in 2012, where she is now the Douglas Strain Endowed Professor. The current focus of her laboratory is on the development of novel fluorescent probes to improved macroscopic and microscopic patient-specific imaging.