Baylor Receives $1M Grant to Acquire an IVIS Spectrum/Quantum GX2 optical/microCT Small Animal Imaging System

Thank you to Dr. Chris Becker and our very own Dr. Jonathan Kelber who put in a lot of effort helping Dr. Becker with the proposal to acquire an IVIS Spectrum/Quantum GX2 optical/microCT Small Animal Imaging System. The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas awarded almost $1M in an effort to enhance investigator-initiated studies of solid tumors (90% of adult human cancers) using this system.

Small-animal, multimodal imaging has been identified as an essential tool for preclinical cancer research and the proposed system will leverage existing core facilities and personnel infrastructure in the University's vivarium, microscopy, and instrumentation cores to provide access to a unique, multimodal combination of optical and microCT imaging. This system will enhance and enable a broad range of cancer research for a multidisciplinary group of established and early-stage investigators (and their trainees) across biology, chemistry, psychology, neuroscience and nutrition disciplines at Baylor University. Baylor investigators are now developing novel anti-cancer therapies, revealing mechanisms of tumor growth/proliferation, and identifying relationships between tumor progression and other indicators of health; such as gut biodiversity, heart/lung function, and muscle/bone composition (for multiple cancers including pancreatic, breast, hepatocellular, colorectal, prostate, and lung malignancies). The components of the proposed imaging systems can support this work independently, but more notably, are intuitively designed to seamlessly combine 3D anatomical, functional and molecular imaging modalities via automatic co-registration of the optical and microCT datasets.

In the past 3 years, cancer research at Baylor has grown to represent 22% of all external research expenditures and a recent University initiative targeted at expanding biomedical research is expected to double the number of faculty with cancer-related expertise and funding over the next several years. The addition of this instrumentation will create an accessible resource that will enable rapid progress in cancer discovery.