My lab uses state-of-the-art molecular imaging technologies to monitor disease progression and to evaluate therapeutic efficacy. On the whole, my lab is split between three seemingly divergent subjects, namely the imaging of bacterial infections, assessing tumor development processes during cancer and tracking neutrophil response during inflammation. Although seemingly unrelated these processes and diseases have nascent similarities in that they are triggered by an abnormal cluster of cells (either self or foreign) that grow rapidly in the host at rates governed by a combination of both the individual bacterial or cancer cells' reproduction parameters and by the degree of host immune response to this new stimuli (e.g., neutrophil burst or macrophage involvement in the growing tumor). In all cases, we have to tailor our studies to maximize the information acquired in our defined imaging window.
