Skip to contents
In This Issue:
Nathalie Agar, PhD, explains how this mass spectrometer instrument is helping her research in the Surgical Molecular Imaging Laboratory.
Members of BWH Institute for the Neurosciences and supporters of the Brain Science Foundation (BSF) last week celebrated the opening of Neurosurgery’s Surgical Molecular Imaging Laboratory (SMIL).
Nathalie Agar, PhD, director of SMIL, welcomed nearly 30 guests and offered a tour of her new laboratory, which features the latest technology to perform mass spectrometry imaging for the molecular diagnosis of brain and other central nervous system tumors. The Brain Science Foundation and the Daniel E. Ponton Fund have pledged ongoing support for SMIL.
Through her research, she is working on ways to study cells at a chemistry level to help surgeons and oncologists better identify a tumor during surgery. “We need to improve cancer surgery and, in order to do that, we need to help surgeons better see what is and what is not a tumor in the brain,” said Agar, whose research could enable surgeons to identify brain and other tumors in real time more accurately. This would minimize the amount of healthy tissue removed during surgery, while maximizing tumor resection.
Another benefit of breaking down cells to a chemistry level is that it allows for identifying the make-up of a tumor and its behavior, enabling researchers to study how tumors react to certain drugs, therefore allowing for personalized treatments, from surgery to the administration of select adjuvant chemotherapy.
Interdisciplinary collaboration has been and will be essential to the development of the SMIL. Neuro-surgery, neuro-radiology, neurology, neuro-psychiatry, and neuro-pathology all are be ing advanced and brought together with this research.
Agar’s research eventually may help surgeons accurately identify tumorous cells during surgery even before sending samples to Pathology for analysis and diagnosis, said David Silbersweig, MD, chair of the Department of Psychiatry and BWH Institute for the Neurosciences.
“Nathalie, with the support of generous donors and the BWH Biomedical Research Institute, brought this vision to a reality, integrating insights from basic science and clinical care. Both components are essential to an initiative that holds so much potential for improving outcomes for patients with some of the most devastating neurological diseases,” said Silbersweig.
Agar added, “We’re not there yet as we’re just getting started, but BWH is the place to make translational science work.”