About This Webinar
The main goal of Barroso and her colleagues’ research is to accelerate preclinical drug discovery by developing novel imaging assays to screen and optimize the delivery of targeted anti-cancer drugs to tumors in the liver and other organs. Combining her research group’s expertise on the regulation of membrane trafficking pathways with methodological advancements in imaging technology, they have advanced the visualization, quantitation, and optimization of drug delivery into cancer cells using receptor-targeted approaches. She and her group have established macroscopic fluorescence lifetime imaging (MFLI) associated with Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) to report quantitatively on antibody-target engagement in live intact animals at the organ level. Barroso uses FRET FLI imaging to quantify the binding of near-infrared-labeled antibody drugs to breast cancer cells or tumor xenografts. She shows that FLI-FRET measurements correlate with receptor binding in tumor cells, but, strikingly, not with ubiquitously used ex vivo receptor expression assessment. This means this method successfully distinguishes between passive accumulation and drug-target binding. Recently, she and her research group have extended this assay to anti-HER2 antibody drugs — for example, trastuzumab — to report quantitatively on antibody-target binding in live intact animals at the tumor level.
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About the presenter
Margarida Barroso, Ph.D., is a professor at the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Albany Medical College in Albany, N.Y. She received her doctorate in genetics from the University of Lisbon/Gulbenkian Institute of Sciences in Portugal and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. She has published more than 60 papers in peer-reviewed journals, with several cover selections. Barroso has edited a book, Imaging from Cells to Animals in Vivo, published by Taylor & Francis (2020), and has two issued patents on FRET imaging technology.
Barroso’s imaging expertise at multiscale is demonstrated by her numerous instructor positions in international workshops, as well as by her chairing of multiple sessions at ASCB, SPIE Photonics West, Society of Leukocyte Biology, and Experimental Biology scientific meetings. She is a past-president of the Histochemical Society.
Barroso’s research goal is to accelerate preclinical drug discovery by developing novel imaging assays to screen and optimize the delivery of targeted anti-cancer drugs. She is also interested in the regulation of membrane trafficking pathways and of receptor-mediated cholesterol and iron transport in vitro and in vivo. Barroso’s diverse expertise integrates basic cell biology with methodological advancements in imaging technology to position her research group as a major force in the visualization, quantitation, and optimization of drug delivery into cancer cells using receptor-targeted approaches.