Like most biochemists, Susie Boydston-White spends much of her workday gazing at cells through a microscope. But where her peers are likely to use visible light microscopes, Boydston-White favors infrared light. And research she is now conducting could pave the way for critical new insights into cell structure and disease.
The advantage of exposing tissue samples to infrared light “is that, instead of getting an image consisting of solid dots, or pixels of color, we get a graph or “spectrum of energy” for each pixel,” says Boydston-White, an associate professor in BMCC’s department of science. Dissected by specialized computer programs, those spectral patterns can provide a wealth of information about the cell’s proteins, carbohydrates, and genetic materials, as well as changes in its composition and structure.
Bringing cells out of the shadows
“We’re still trying to figure out what all this data means,” Boydston-White says. But, eventually, the patterns will yield answers to a range of questions that would be unanswerable using conventional microscopic techniques. “We could determine if a cell is alive and behaving normally, or sick and dying,” she says, although the death of viable cells is not necessarily a bad thing, she is quick to add. “Obviously, if the cells are cancerous, your first priority is to kill them.”
Indeed, the implications for cancer treatments are profound. “Once the patterns of spectral changes are correlated with a cell type or its state of health, a computer algorithm could be trained to identify the changes and provide a diagnosis,” she says.
More importantly, infrared micropectroscopy is well-suited to the study of live tissue; conventional light microscopy is generally limited to frozen or fixed samples. Thus, using spectroscopic techniques, doctors could excise a live sample of a patient’s tumor and treat it with various chemotherapeutic agents before the drugs are administered. “Once they’ve identified which drugs were most effective, then they could treat the patient,” says Boydston-White.
Checking for cancer in real time
Using infrared microscopy, researchers might test the efficacy of cancer drugs under development far more quickly and economically than is currently possible.
Or consider this scenario: while a patient is undergoing surgery for tumor removal, lymph nodes found near the cancer could be scanned for metastatic cancer cells while the patient is still on the operating table. “If the lymph nodes contain cancerous cells, the surgeon would know to look for more lymph nodes to check for other metastases,” Boydston-White says, “This would eliminate the need to wait several days for the pathology report to come back before scheduling a subsequent surgery.”
To be sure, the research is still in its infancy. “We still need to develop the hardware necessary for performing quick tissue analyses and interpreting the results,” Boydston-White says. “But as the technology and our ability to gather data improve, we will learn more about what we’re seeing — and, more importantly, how to use the information to treat illness and save lives.”
