From: May, Sandra M [mailto:smmay@purdue.edu] Sent: Friday, April 06, 2012 2:12 PM To: May, Sandra M Subject: BME Seminar announcement: April 11, 9:30AM, MJIS 1001 (teleconferenced to SL-220 at IUPUI) BME Seminar Series Wednesday, April 11, 2012 9:30-10:20am MJIS 1001 The seminar will be teleconferenced to SL-220 at IUPUI. Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering Purdue University Optical Diagnostics for Diseased and Engineered Tissues Irene Georgakoudi, PhD Associate Professor Department of Biomedical Engineering Tufts University Abstract: Development of functional engineered tissues has the potential to improve significantly current approaches aimed at repairing or replacing damaged tissues and organs. In addition, engineered tissues could serve as highly relevant and useful models for disease and for screening novel drugs and therapies. Methods to assess the development and function of these tissues are traditionally limited by their invasive and destructive nature. Our recent work demonstrates that optical spectroscopic imaging approaches can overcome these limitations and provide functional biochemical and organizational/structural information about tissues. We specifically aim to identify optical biomarkers associated with adipose and bone engineered tissue development and early cancer development using non-linear spectroscopic imaging methods that rely on endogenous fluorescence and scattering. Intrinsic two photon excited fluorescence (TPEF) has been used as the main platform to characterize tissue structure and function. Acquisition of emission spectra at multiple excitation wavelengths reveals that key aspects of the composition and organization of silk biomaterial scaffolds can be assessed using TPEF and second harmonic generation (SHG). Similar spectroscopic images also demonstrate that important biochemical and morphological parameters associated with stem cell differentiation can be extracted in two and three-dimensional cultures. Measurements performed on the same scaffolds over a period of six months illustrate that significant dynamic biochemical changes can be monitored to extract important insights in metabolic biochemical pathways. Biochemical and subtle, microscale organizational differences can also be detected as a function of depth within engineered normal and pre-cancerous epithelial tissues. Such non-invasive biomarkers could be ultimately used to develop improved diagnostics and to assess functional tissue development either in response to different stimuli or as quality controls prior to implantation. Bio: Irene Georgakoudi is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University. She has been working on the use of lasers for therapeutic and diagnostic applications since her undergraduate years. She started as a physicist at Dartmouth College and continued her graduate studies in Biophysics at the University of Rochester. Her interests in spectroscopy and spectroscopic imaging using endogenous sources of contrast were founded during her postdoctoral years at the MIT Spectroscopy Lab. After working on the development of fluorescence-based in vivo flow cytometry while an Instructor at the Wellman Laboratories for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, she moved to Tufts in 2004. She is the author of several patents on the development and use of spectroscopy and imaging to characterize tissues or to detect specific populations of cells and has published numerous peer reviewed manuscripts, review articles and book chapters in these topics. She is the recipient of a Claflin Distinguished Scholar, an NSF Career, and an American Cancer Society Research Scholar award. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Optical Society of America ~BME Faculty Host: Young Kim~ ***Coffee and juice will be provided at West Lafayette***