Lina Hacker awarded Postgraduate Student Thesis Prize

Lina Hacker has been announced as the winner of this year’s Postgraduate Student Thesis Prize. The Prize is awarded each year to an exceptional postgraduate student who has completed an outstanding piece of work during their studies.

Lina Hacker completed her PhD in the Bohndiek Group, supervised by Professor Sarah Bohndiek. For her studies, Hacker validated a new imaging technique to image blood vessels and oxygen in tissues.

Tumours often have a poor blood supply or abnormal blood vessels leading to areas of the tumour having low oxygen levels. These areas of the tumour can either have consistently low oxygen levels, or their oxygen levels can fluctuate over time. Fluctuation in oxygen levels within a tumour has been linked with resistance to cancer treatments and worse patient outcomes.

To investigate the variations in oxygen levels within tumours, the Bohndiek Group uses a technique called photoacoustic imaging. Photoacoustic imaging uses light to slightly heat a tissue causing sound vibrations which can be recorded by an ultrasound detector. How a tumour reacts with the light, and the vibrations that are created depends on certain characteristics of the tissue.

Photoacoustic imaging has the potential to non-invasively map blood distribution and oxygen levels in our body using both light and sound. However, to fulfill this potential in future studies, photoacoustic scanners need to be rigorously tested to build confidence in the technique and standardise measurements.

Hacker researched and developed a material that could be used to create tissue-like samples to test the photoacoustic scanners. Ensuring that along with reacting to light and sound in the same way as tissue does, it was also safe, low-cost and the ingredients were readily available.

Once developed, Hacker used the material to thoroughly test the photoacoustic scanners to outline their strengths and limitations in imaging blood vessels in tissues.

Photoacoustic scanners were then used on two different breast cancer mouse models and identified that oxygen levels varied more in the more aggressive tumour model. These findings highlight the promise of the technique to strengthen our understanding on oxygen variation in tumours, which may help to develop better cancer therapies in future.

Since completing her PhD, Lina has continued working in Sarah Bohndiek’s group as a postdoctoral researcher investigating her current findings in more depth.