2009 Coulter Funded Projects: "Non-invasive Ultrasonic Prostate Tissue Ablation using Histotripsy in Treatment of Prostate Cancer"
Charles Cain, PhD and William Roberts, MD
Fourth year of funding - 2009 funding: $125,000; funding to date $475,000
Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) is a common urologic condition among older men that frequently manifests as lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS). The increased frequency of symptoms with age, coupled with an associated decrease in quality of life prompted 4.5 million physician visits for a primary diagnosis of BPH in 2000. In that same year, direct costs for non-pharmacologic treatment of BPH were estimated to be $1.1 billion.
Current therapies for BPH are lacking. Transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP) - long considered the gold standard - has a significant risk profile that may be less tolerable in older patients and those with co-morbidities. Minimally invasive treatments, although widely employed, are uniformly less effective than TURP due to their inability to provide sufficient tissue debulking. Although some patients with mild LUTS may derive durable benefit from minimally invasive thermal modalities, a significant portion will eventually fail and require definitive tissue debulking therapy when they are older, have increased co-morbidity, and thus are at greater risk of surgical complication. There is a need for development of new technologies that can replicate the anatomic effect and efficacy of TURP with an improved risk profile.
Intracellular nanosurgery using "ultrafast" lasers reveals the mechanics of chromosome distribution during cell division. Investigators Kevin Ke and Jun Cheng, working with Prof. Alan Hunt in the Cellular and Molecular Biomechanics Lab, have applied femtosecond pulsed lasers to precisely alter the size of chromosomes, thus perturbing the balance of forces that guide chromosome movements, and thereby demonstrating that chromosome segregation depends on the distribution of "polar ejection forces" within a cell.
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Hesam Jahanian, a third year PhD student working with Professor Luis Hernandez-Garcia and Professor Douglas Noll in functional MRI lab, received the "Best student poster" award of white matter study group at the 17th annual meeting of ISMRM (International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine). ISMRM, the most prestigious conference in the field of magnetic resonance imaging, took place in Honolulu, Hawaii this past April 2009. Hesam's poster focussed on a paper he co-authored with BME student Azadeh Yazdan-Shahmorad of the Neural Engineering Lab. The paper, titled "White matter tractography by diffusion tensor imaging in Insular Epilepsy," presents a reproducible and non-invasive method to target insular epilepsy patients using magnetic resonance imaging techniques.
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