21/04/2021 - Charles (ESR #9)
This image presents a Mass Spectrometry Imaging (MSI) section of a mouse heart. MSI enables to visualise biomolecules or chemical compounds on tissue sections. During the last decade, MSI has emerged as a powerful technique in drug development.
MSI can be used to investigate spatial distribution of a drug and its metabolites. In this context, we performed an image acquisition of hearts dosed with doxorubicin. Doxorubicin is an efficient anti-cancer drug that may cause dose-dependent cardiotoxicity. The image (top slide) shows three hearts of which two were collected 3 (middle) and 24 hours (right) post-doxorubicin injection. A colour scale of intensity (from blue-minimum to white-maximum) represents the concentration of doxorubicin. In a next step, this workflow can be complemented by MSI-guided proteomics and metabolomics approaches to estimate the impact of the drug within the tissue.
During my PhD-project, I will employ MSI and spatial -omics strategies to study drug distribution and the associated tissue response in the field of cardiovascular diseases, safety pharmacology and toxicology.