About 90% of breast cancer patients die due to metastatic spread and not due to the primary tumor. However, the morbidity associated with the development of tumor metastases has led to a majority of the 240,000 patients diagnosed annually with breast cancer receiving adjuvant chemotherapy. Therefore, there is a critical need to develop methods that can distinguish between potentially deadly and indolent breast cancers and therefore reduce the number of patients who are overtreated with adjuvant chemotherapy. Recent studies have shown that although this switch to aerobic glycolysis might be useful for rapid cell proliferation and tumor growth, highly invasive and metastatic cancer cells favor mitochondrial oxidative metabolism to efficiently generate ATP and promote an invasive or migratory phenotype. We are interested in methods to identify possible metabolic and molecular biomarkers of metastasis within the primary tumor itself using optical imaging technologies.
Funding: Arkansas Breast Cancer Research Program
Collaborators: Ishan Barman (Johns Hopkins University)
Relevant Publications:
Evaluating differences in optical properties of indolent and aggressive murine breast tumors using quantitative diffuse reflectance spectroscopy
Rodriguez Troncoso JI, Mim UM, Ivers JD, Paidi SK, Harper MG, Nguyen KG, Ravindranathan S, Rebello L, Lee DE, Zaharoff DA, Barman I, Rajaram N, Biomedical Optics Express
Raman spectroscopy reveals phenotype switches in breast cancer metastasis
Paidi SK, Rodriguez Troncoso JI, Harper MG, Liu Z, Nguyen KG, Ravindranathan S, Ivers JD, Zaharoff DA, Rajaram N, Barman I, Theranostics
Optical redox ratio identifies metastatic potential-dependent changes in breast cancer cell metabolism
Alhallak K, Rebello L, Muldoon TJ, Quinn KP, and Rajaram N, Biomedical Optics Express