Cancer Research at AMOLF

The American National Institutes of Health (NIH), the most important financer for research in health care in the US, has honoured a joint application for Ron Heeren, group leader at AMOLF, and Kristine Glunde at Johns Hopkins University Medical School in Baltimore (JHU).

A central point of focus in this transatlantic cooperation is the study of hypoxia-driven molecular signal routes in breast cancer. Using various molecular imaging techniques, both in vivo and histological, molecular distribution in tumours, that have grown from human breast cancer cell lines , are mapped two and three-dimensionally.

For this research, which will last four years, AMOLF will use and further develop the high resolution imaging combined with mass microscopy. Dr. Kristine Glunde and her group will label selected proteins with GFP. At AMOLF signal molecules are mapped with the same special distribution. KnowEx, the platform for transfer of knowledge, designed at AMOLF for the "Virtual laboratory for e-science", facilitates the bringing together of the various molecular and anatomical image modalities (MRI, Computer Tomography, confocal imaging and MS imaging). This way the researchers hope to visualize for the first time the molecular players that regulate hypoxia-driven processes in breast cancer cells.