Irene Georgakoudi: Optical, label-free, morphofunctional metabolic imaging

In this BiOS Hot Topics session, Irene Georgakoudi of Tufts University describes her group's work with two-photon microscopy for assessing cellular metabolism. Because metabolic changes are highly dynamic and can occur in seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months, even years, "many techniques are not great for monitoring metabolic changes," she says.  "We are interested in understanding the meaning and impact of metabolic change in our ability to treat things like cancer."

Their research into optical metabolic biomarkers takes advantage of two fluorophores that naturally fluoresce: NADH and FAD, which are involved in many metabolic pathways. They are looking at applications in drug discovery, drug safety, and treatment optimization.

The group recently published a paper on this work in Science Advances.

Irene Georgakoudi has been working on the use of lasers for therapeutic and diagnostic applications since her undergraduate years. She started as a physicist at Dartmouth College and continued her graduate studies in Biophysics at the University of Rochester.

Her interests in spectroscopy and spectroscopic imaging using endogenous sources of contrast were founded during her postdoctoral years at the MIT Spectroscopy Lab. After working on the development of fluorescence-based in vivo flow cytometry while an Instructor at the Wellman Laboratories for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, she moved to Tufts in 2004.

She is the author of several patents on the development and use of spectroscopy and imaging to characterize tissues or to detect specific populations of cells and has published numerous peer reviewed manuscripts, review articles and book chapters in these topics.

Related SPIE content:

Irene Georgakoudi: SPIE Women in Optics
A profile from the 2017 Women in Optics planner.