Urs Utzinger: A new age of imaging for cancer detection

Understandably, you might be nervous about a biopsy and having a needle or a blade remove a bit of your tissue so a lab can check it for cancer. Up to now, there were few alternatives to learn whether a tissue sample was healthy or cancerous. But what if there was a new option? What if you could choose to have a tiny camera photograph your living cells, with no needle, no anesthetic, no stitches? Such images might one day be just as useful to a doctor, or perhaps more so. And you may have Urs Utzinger to thank for groundbreaking work that may make that possible.
 

The same imaging technology may answer questions like how a cancer’s blood vessels decide where to grow, as they grab onto a tissue fiber like a gymnast on a rope climb. With that knowledge, University of Arizona (UA) labs could devise ways to use drugs to disrupt those deadly invasions.  

Utzinger, an associate professor of biomedical engineering in the Arizona Research Laboratories and a BIO5 member, hopes to perfect devices that can make a slow-motion movie of sorts, with a frame every minute or so, filming cell behavior within a living organ—called in vitro imaging.

Utzinger is a top expert on the growth behaviors of ovarian cancer tissue. He hopes to find a way at last to make an early, accurate diagnosis of that often-fatal disease and to solve the mysteries about its growth by photographing it in living tissue biopsies.

In a small BIO5 engineering chamber, with the air temperature evenly controlled to make sure the metals don’t change shape, Utzinger and his team are making prototypes of devices that can photograph cells as small as 20 microns across, a fraction of a human hair. Those pictures will be so detailed that even when enlarged hundreds of times, they’ll still be sharp enough for a diagnosis.

“We use the natural optical properties of living systems,” Utzinger said. “We measure the optical signatures of cells inside the patients. That lets us learn how blood vessels move, grow, migrate and spread inside the body. How do they formulate, then reform, and remodel the environment, the matrix of the tissue, in order to move?”

A blood vessel forms tentacles in a growth phase, Utzinger says, as it squeezes its way through healthy tissue, grabs hold of the matrix of collagen, or muscle tissue, and pulls itself along. In normal growth, vessels stay in balance with the environment. In cancer, vessels go wild on an abnormal growth spurt. “Things go haywire,” Utzinger says. “There’s unlimited proliferation. They go as fast as they can, and that’s cancer.”

Utzinger, who was born in Zurich, received his doctorate in 1995 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, working in biomedical engineering and cardiology. His post-doctoral work was at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also worked in the Spectroscopy Laboratory. He joined the UA in 2001 working in obstetrics and gynecology and biomedical engineering, and later in the College of Optical Sciences and BIO5.

He hopes to help his collaborators develop new imaging weapons against cancer.

“After a cancer invasion, we can use drugs to interfere with the cell’s motility,” Utzinger said. “I want to see that path, in time series, and to show that the cells can’t move as fast if we inhibit the ability of vessels to lay down their path.”

Utzinger is a like a traffic cop, watching the constant motion on the street as the body’s cells move about, learning how they replenish, grow and heal. “The body is not static,” he says. “I would like to see how the cells sense the mechanics of their environment, and figure where they want to go next. And I want to see this in real time, in an actual sample, not from a static picture.”

Collaboration Snapshot

Urs Utzinger collaborates with researchers across the campus and around the world in biomedical engineering, in obstetrics and gynecology in the College of Medicine, in electrical and computer engineering and optical sciences.

That work aims to develop new technologies for tissue assessment that will increase performance of diagnosis and will be cost-effective and increase access to health care. It seeks to develop optical techniques for the early diagnosis of tissue pathologies and monitoring of drug activity.

He describes his work as a clinically oriented collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to investigate optical tools for the evaluation of female genital tract abnormalities. Currently, the research emphasis includes the application of spectroscopic techniques in microscopic and macroscopic imaging of tissue in vivo and in culture. His team studies the biology of extracellular matrix degradation, investigating the optical signature of the collagen matrix in a cultured environment, using spectrofluorimetry and multiphoton microscopy.

Other collaborative projects include imaging the mouse colon, developing a miniaturized fiberoptic imaging system and novel tomographic and spectroscopic data analysis and management tools. His data is linked through mathematical models with metabolism, oxygenation, matrix integrity and morphology.

Accomplishments

Urs Utzinger’s work was featured in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention in an article titled “Endogenous Optical Biomarkers of Ovarian Cancer Evaluated with Multiphoton Microscopy.”

He has published widely in the fields of spectroscopy and multispectral digital imaging and holds a series of patents in those fields with his collaborators.

For more information: www.bio5.org and 520.626.2465