A team of researchers from the University of Kentucky’s Pigman College of Engineering Joseph Halcomb III, M.D. Department of Biomedical Engineering was selected as an editor’s pick for their paper, "Multi-parametric functional optical spectroscopy to monitor the metabolic and vascular changes in small head and neck tumors in vivo with radiation stress," in the July issue of Biomedical Optics Express.
The paper features the work of researchers and Ph.D. candidates in the Spectroscopic Imaging Lab, Jing Yan, Pranto Soumik Saha, Md Zahid Hasan, along with Caigang Zhu, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical engineering, and Cristina M. Furdui, Ph.D., from Wake Forest University.
The team’s research addresses a critical challenge in oncology — understanding and identifying radiation-resistant tumors. Tumor hypoxia and metabolic rewiring are both known to contribute to resistance to radiation therapy, but existing technologies have struggled to monitor these changes simultaneously in living tumors.
Zhu’s team developed a portable, multi-parametric optical spectroscopy system that, for the first time, enables real-time monitoring of both vascular and metabolic changes in small head and neck tumors in vivo during fractional radiation therapy.
In preclinical studies, the system revealed dramatic physiological differences between radiation-sensitive and radiation-resistant tumors. Specifically, radioresistant tumors showed significant reoxygenation and a metabolic shift from glycolysis to oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) during treatment—changes not seen in more radiosensitive tumors. These insights could help clinicians better predict treatment outcomes and open new pathways for targeted therapies.
Editor's picks serve to highlight articles with excellent scientific quality and are representative of the work taking place in a specific field. A full version of the paper can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1364/BOE.565339.
Recent new studies showed that both tumor hypoxia and metabolic rewiring are critical for the development of radiation resistance. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of tumor hypoxia and metabolic rewiring together is critical for the development of targeted therapeutic strategies to improve clinical outcomes for tumor treatment. However, very few techniques are available to allow one monitor both vascular and metabolic parameters on in vivo tumors. Dr. Zhu’s group reported a portable multi-parametric functional optical spectroscopy to monitor metabolic and vascular changes in small head and neck tumors in vivo with fractional radiation therapy. For the first time, the team captured the key metabolic and vascular parameters of head and neck xenograft tumors in vivo prior to and post a total of 10 Gy fractional radiation therapy. The animal studies showed dramatic vascular and metabolic changes in radioresistant head and neck tumors under radiation stress, but not in radiosensitive head and neck tumors. Specifically, radioresistant head and neck tumors had significant reoxygenation and obvious metabolic shift from glycolysis to OXPHOS under RT. In contrast, radiosensitive head and neck tumors had minimal changes in either vascular or metabolic changes under RT. Looking at both reoxygenation and mitochondrial function may provide greater insight on the prediction of radioresistant tumors, and the mitochondrial metabolism pathway may potentially be an effective therapeutic target to improve RT outcomes. These results also demonstrated the potential of the reported portable multi-parametric functional optical spectroscopy to evaluate tumor vascular and metabolic changes under therapeutic stresses for future head and neck cancer research.
