February 22nd CTE Seminar

Guest Speaker

Title: Interstitial fluid flow in the brain tumor microenvironment

Presenter: Dr. Eli Vlaisavljevich

Research group: Webpage

Histotripsy is a non-thermal Focused Ultrasound (FUS) ablation method currently being developed for the non-invasive treatment of cancer and other clinical applications in which tissue removal is desired. Since histotripsy is non-thermal, it does not have share the limitations of thermal ablation and can create homogeneous and consistent ablation even in highly vascular organs such as the liver. Histotripsy uses short, high-pressure ultrasound pulses to generate a cavitation bubble cloud at a targeted location inside the body, with the expansion and collapse of these bubbles resulting in the complete disintegration of the target tissue into acellular debris. Previous work has shown that histotripsy is dependent upon tissue mechanical properties, with stiffer tissues being more resistant to histotripsy-induced damage. These effects have allowed for the development of histotripsy as a tissue selective ablation method in which a soft tissue (i.e. tumor) is completely liquefied while stiffer critical structures within the treatment zone (i.e. vessels) remain intact. In this seminar, I will discuss our work studying the basic mechanisms underlying the histotripsy process and our in vivo studies showing the feasibility of histotripsy for non-invasive liver surgery. I will also present some of our work developing nanoparticle-mediated histotripsy (NMH), a novel ablation method combining histotripsy with acoustically sensitive nanoparticles for targeted multi-focal cancer cell ablation. Finally, I will discuss ongoing work in our laboratory to develop FUS methods for non-invasive neuromodulation and tissue regeneration.