- Imaging-guided therapy of malignant brain tumors (glioblastoma) is our main focus using molecular imaging strategies.
Molecular Imaging
Molecular imaging allows the non invasive assessment and monitoring of disease specific biological/molecular processes in vivo. Therefore, several techniques i.e. magnetic resonance, radionuclide or optically based imaging procedures are applied.
Molecular imaging in particular permits not only the localization and quantification but also the evaluation of the intra individual dynamic of molecular changes over time.
In recent years, diverse reporter systems have been developed to visualize and analyze molecular processes in vivo, like endogenous and exogenous gene expression, transcriptional regulation as well as signal transduction. Depending on the imaging strategy, different reporter systems are required, which consist of a reporter gene and a reporter substrate or ligand.
Methods
For analysis of novel therapy approaches by imaging strategies, we use adequate molecular reporter systems, but also multimodal imaging techniques are applied. We utilise the advantages of several imaging approaches complementarily to achieve the most accurate answer to our scientific problems. Magnetic resonance tomography (MRI) e.g. is characterised by its high spatial resolution whereas positron emission tomography (PET) is featured by a high sensitivity and definite quantification. The optical imaging approaches (Optical Imaging) allow the direct transfer of cell biological findings to in vivo applications. To validate the imaging data, we use invasive techniques, like immunohistochemistry and autoradiography.