Octavian Bucur
Associate Investigator, Viron Molecular Medicine Institute
Title: Expansion Pathology: physical tissue expansion for advanced investigation of clinical specimens
Biography
Biography: Octavian Bucur
Abstract
In diagnostic pathology, conventional optical microscopy is critical to diagnosis. Unfortunately, due to physical limitations, optical microscopy can reach only ~250 nm in resolution, making the use of higher resolution imaging strategies (such as electron microscopy) required for investigation, diagnosis and/or confirmation of certain pathologies. In a Harvard-MIT multidisciplinary collaboration, we developed a pathology-optimized form of physical tissue expansion named Expansion Pathology (ExPath), which enables homogenous and isometric tissue expansion (approximately 100-fold in three-dimension) that can push the optical resolution limit of the optical microscopes to ~70-80 nm.
We used ExPath to demonstrate high precision discrimination between early breast neoplastic lesions that to date have challenged pathological classification and for optical investigation and diagnosis of kidney nephrotic lesions, which were previously diagnosed or confirmed with an electron microscope.
Expansion Pathology is an inexpensive, fast, reliable method which may open up the routine use of nanoscale imaging in pathology, enabling advanced investigation of clinical specimens and improved diagnosis of pathologies such as cancer.