Title:  Engineering Echogenic Immune Cells for Ultrasound Imaging and Diagnosis of Human Disease

Committee: 

Dr. Arvanitis, Advisor    

Dr. Emelianov, Co-Advisor     

Dr. Degertekin, Chair

Dr. Lindsey

Abstract: The objective of the proposed research is to develop echogenic immune cells for ultrasound imaging and diagnosis of human diseases. There has been an impressive development in cancer immunotherapy particularly cell-based immunotherapy in the last few years. As a result of this development, there is a need for immune cell therapies to also be trackable to better identify on-target and off-target effects. Moreover, imaging of immune cells trafficking (trajectories, mean velocity) and their interaction with diseases like cancer (residence to host) could reveal important molecular, cellular, anatomical, and functional characteristics of the host tissue thus providing a diagnostic value, in addition to providing new insights in immune‐cell biology. While recent advances in immune cell labeling and imaging technologies have provided new capabilities in studying immune cell trafficking, there is a lack of methods capable of tracking single cells deep in the tissue. We hypothesize that labeling immune cells with microbubble ultrasound contrast agents (USCA) to render them visible to ultrasound can enable high sensitivity imaging of immune cell trafficking deep into tissues.