Mekhail Anwar, MD PhD(link is external)
Associate Professor, Radiation Oncology
University of California, San Francisco
mekhail.anwar@ucsf.edu | anwarlab.ucsf.edu
Personalized Cancer Therapy Through InVivo Imaging
Abstract
We will discuss how to personalize cancer therapy through the development of new integrated circuit-based platforms for monitoring the real-time tissue response to immunotherapy - a treatment strategy whereby the body’s own immune system is unlocked to fight cancer.
Our group is developing INSITE - Implantable Photonic Sensors for Immunoresponse in the Tumor microEnvironment. It is, in essence, an in vivo wireless biopsy: a network of millimeter scale imaging “motes'' implanted in the tumor and surrounding tissue relaying real-time multicellular response. This is a critical unmet need in cancer as patients with presumed “identical” diseases have widely varying responses to therapy, which cannot be predicted a priori, and imaging-based tests often require months to register a clinically significant change. Real-time tumor response is essential to instantaneously adapting treatment based on a patient’s actual response. A major application of this strategy is guiding treatment for the over 50% of cancer patients given immunotherapy who do not respond to treatment. This will enable rapid feedback to pivot to more effective therapies - with the potential to turn a “cold” or non-responding tumor into a “hot”, or responding one.
This work builds on a chip-scale fluorescence imager with an initial application for guiding cancer surgeries by visualizing microscopic tumor foci, commonly left behind during curative intent resection. These tumor deposits are identified using fluorescently labeled targeted molecular imaging agents. Having established a molecular imager on a chip, we then extend to imaging multiple cell types simultaneously. Integrating the chip-based imager on a wireless power and communications platform enables implantation and periodic monitoring over long time periods, which opens the door to monitoring tissue in vivo.
Biography
Mekhail Anwar is a Physician-Scientist and Associate Professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) with a joint laboratory between UCSF and UC Berkeley, focusing on developing microfabricated sensors and integrated circuits for cancer detection within the body. Educated at UC Berkeley in Physics, he completed his MD at UC San Francisco, and went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where his Ph.D. in electrical engineering focused on using ICs for biosensing. He returned to complete his residency in Radiation Oncology at UCSF and continued as faculty, where he earned the DOD Prostate Cancer Research Program Physician Award for his work in cancer imaging. He is the recipient of the NIH Trailblazer Award for developing chip-scale imagers for cancer and was recently awarded the NIH (DP2) New Innovator Award for in vivo imaging of immunotherapy response. His overall research program is dedicated to the development of an in vivo internet of things geared towards interfacing with the cells and molecules that drive treatment response.