Professor Dr Frauke Alves
University Medical Centre Göttingen, Germany.
Host: Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
Date: 2 April 2009
Brief biography
Prof. Frauke AlvesProf. Frauke Alves is a Clinician in the Dept. of Hematology and Oncology at the University Medical Centre of the Göttingen University, Germany. She has done extensive research on tyrosine kinases and cancer as a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Axel Ullrich before establishing her own research group in the Oncology and Haematology department. She also manages a second research group at the Max-Planck-Institute of Experimental Medicine in Göttingen with the aim to translate basic knowledge into clinical practice.
Her interdisciplinary research group is focused on the investigations of mechanisms of tumor progression, angiogenesis, neuronal signaling and the development of novel anti-tumor therapies. She has extensive experience with orthotropic metastatic tumor models in immuno-incompetent mice through the investigation of the functional role of tumor progression-associated genes and the preclinical evaluation of novel antitumor agents.
To monitor noninvasively tumor growth and spread in mice over time, two different imaging techniques are applied. The flat-panel detector-based volume-computed tomograph (fpVCT) provides, in conjunction with contrast agents, high-resolution 3D images for the detection of in vivo osteolytic lesions, lymph nodes, lung and liver metastasis as well as the accurate dynamic measurements of tumor volumes, vessel formation and morphological changes within the tumors.
For the in vivo characterization of antibodies to tumor-associated antigens in primary tumors and metastases, as well as migration of fluorescently labeled stem cells, the small animal optical imager for time-resolved near infrared (NIR) fluorescence detection has been applied that operates with four excitation wavelengths. Furthermore, NIR imaging has been shown by her group to allow analyzing expression and activity of tumour-associated enzymes in vivo. Fusion of both imaging techniques allows to associate fluorescent signals to tumor sites and metastases within the entire mouse.