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Page 13
J Med Oncl Ther 2017 Volume 2 | Issue 3
allied
academies
International Conference on
Oncology and Cancer Therapeutics
October 30- November 01, 2017 | Chicago, USA
Notes:
Background:
In pathology, examination of cellular structures and
molecular composition using diffraction-limited microscopy is key
to diagnosis. Recently, a new approach, Expansion Microscopy,
was developed to enable physical magnification and high
resolution imaging of cell lines and mouse brain sections with
conventional optical microscopes, by embedding them in a dense
swellable polymer and addingwater to swell the polymer after the
enzymatic digestion of the proteins. The purpose of our study is to
develop a pathology-optimized physical tissue expansion method
for nanometer imaging and investigation of clinical tissue samples
and to analyze its utility in diagnostic pathology and research.
Methodology:
We developed a pathology optimized physical
tissue expansion method called Expansion Pathology (ExPath),
which uses clinically optimized chemistry, labeling and imaging
methodologies to enable the expansion and visualization
of both human FFPE and frozen clinical samples, including
previously stained/unstained, mounted/unmounted and whole
tissue slide/tissue microarrays sections, of a wide variety of
fixed human tissue types and pathologies.
Findings:
This ExPath protocol enabled expansion of human
normal and cancer tissues ~4.5x in linear dimension and ~100x
in volume, with a post-expansion measurement error of 3-7%.
Physicaltissueexpansionpushestheopticalmicroscopesbeyond
their limits (currently 250 nm in resolution), by enabling for the
first time ~70 nm resolution imaging of diverse biomolecules in
intact tissue with an optical microscope. With ExPath, certain
lesions and pathologies of the kidney previously diagnosed
with an electron microscopy (EM) can now be diagnosed
with a conventional optical microscope after physical tissue
expansion, an inexpensive, faster and reliable strategy. It also
enables high-fidelity computational discrimination between
early breast neoplastic lesions that to date have challenged
human judgment.
Conclusion:
ExPath offers new approaches for assessing
pathologically important features in human tissue. It may
eliminate the need for EM in diagnosis of certain diseases
for which EM is required for diagnosis and it can improve the
computational discrimination between pathological lesions
that are hard to distinguish with existing techniques. ExPath
may enable routine use of nanoscale imaging in molecular
pathology and research.
Speaker Biography
Octavian Bucur is working as an Instructor in the Departments of Pathology and
Medicine at the Harvard Medical School, BIDMC, in Boston, MA, focusing on the
development and application of new experimental and computational technologies
with significant impact in molecular, diagnostic pathology and personalized medicine.
He is also a member of the Ludwig Cancer Center at Harvard and Broad Institute of
MIT and Harvard. In collaboration with Dr. Edward Boyden’s laboratory at MIT, he has
developed a pathology-optimized physical tissue expansion method called Expansion
Pathology that enables ~100 times expansion in volume of any type of clinical specimen
and visualization of 70-80 nm structures with conventional optical microscopes
(currently limited to ~250 nm resolution). Expansion Pathology has the potential of
replacing electron microscopy in diagnosis and investigation of certain pathologies and
nanometer structures (Nature Biotechnology, in press; 3 patents filed).
e:
obucur@bidmc.harvard.eduOctavian Bucur
BIDMC, USA
Expansion pathology: Physical tissue expansion for nanoscale imaging and
investigation of clinical specimens