Guigen Liu, PhD: Development of a Two-Photon Microimaging-Microdevice System for Four-Dimensional Imaging of Drug Delivery in Vivo

Guigen Liu, PhD
Instructor in Radiology
Department of Radiology
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Harvard Medical School

Abstract

Individualized treatment of cancers and many other complex diseases is still a challenge because of the lack of clinically reliable information that uncovers the drug efficacy across space, time, and cellular components in living tissues. To this end, Dr. Oliver Jonas’s lab pioneered a promising ‘lab-in-a-patient’ technology which will enable high-throughput evaluation of drug efficacy in vivo. This technology includes an implantable microdevice carrying up to 20 drugs for simultaneous and crosstalk-free drug delivery in the diseased tissue. However, evaluation of drug efficacy for this technology currently still relies on the traditional offsite histology, which only collects information at static time points and may lead to the missing of critical dynamic information. In this talk, our recent efforts on developing an in-situ histology laboratory for the microdevice are presented. More specifically, a two-photon microimaging-microdevice system has been developed and successfully demonstrated to record the dynamic drug delivery process over space and time (i.e., four-dimensional imaging).

Short Bio

Guigen Liu joined Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in 2020, where he has been leading the development of four-dimensional two-photon and Raman microimaging systems for an emerging biomedical microdevice pioneered by the Jonas lab. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Michigan State University, working extensively on optical fiber sensing. He and colleagues pioneered a crystalline silicon-tipped optical fiber sensing platform for high-speed and high-resolution measurement of temperature profiles in the ocean, which received the Alan Berman Research Publication Award from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. In collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, this work also gave birth to the first fiber-optic bolometer in the world, providing a unique diagnostic tool for future clean nuclear energy. Dr. Liu received his PhD degree in mechanical engineering from Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he was appointed as an assistant professor upon graduation.