I'll skip the name word play - it's just too obvious - but I won't skip Michael Angelo's work. Angelo, MD, a pathology instructor at Stanford, developed a new imaging technique that labels antibodies with metallic elements, then uses an ion beam to scan the tissue, revealing up to 100 proteins at once in a single cancer cell.
This technique, called multiplexed ion beam imaging, or MIBI, captured the attention of the National Institutes of Health, which featured Angelo in its NIH Director's Blog this week. The images are lovely to look at, but also quite useful to learn more about tissue types.
Here's Angelo describing the image above:
Angelo used MIBI to analyze a human breast tumor sample for nine proteins simultaneously—each protein stained with an antibody tagged with a metal reporter. Six of the nine proteins are illustrated here. The subpopulation of cells that are positive for three proteins often used to guide breast cancer treatment (estrogen receptor a, progesterone receptor, Ki-67) have yellow nuclei, while aqua marks the nuclei of another group of cells that’s positive for only two of the proteins (estrogen receptor a, progesterone receptor). In the membrane and cytoplasmic regions of the cell, red indicates actin, blue indicates vimentin, which is a protein associated with highly aggressive tumors, and the green is E-cadherin, which is expressed at lower levels in rapidly growing tumors than in less aggressive ones.
Taken together, such “multi-dimensional” information on the types and amounts of proteins in a patient’s tumor sample may give oncologists a clearer idea of how quickly that tumor is growing and which types of treatments may work best for that particular patient. It also shows dramatically how much heterogeneity is present in a group of breast cancer cells that would have appeared identical by less sophisticated methods.
Angelo was given a NIH Director's Early Independence Award last fall, and he's ramping up his investigations of breast cancer.
