The Interventional Oncology Lab

Solid tumors are leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide and has continued to increase in incidence and mortality for several decades. Despite new treatments such as combination therapy of immunotherapy and anti-VEGF drugs, prognosis is still dismal with 26.7% response rate to combination therapy. Combination of immunotherapy and locoregional treatments can prolonged survival of patients.
Locoregional treatments (LRT) are ablation, embolization, and chemoembolization.
Our goal is to characterize transcriptomic patterns and markers of immunosuppression in the tumor microenvironment in cancer patients pre- and post-LRT. We hypothesize that LRT promotes unfavorable immunosuppression transcriptomic tumoral expression in non-responders. Paired biopsies pre- and post-LRT treatment will be collected from cancer patients and will be analyzed using Single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq). Analysis of paired tumor biopsies pre- and post-LRT cannot be found in the literature to date and together with scRNA-seq method can shed light on key elements that regulate response to treatment even with low sample size.
These bioinformatics analyses could identify new immune targets that may lead to the development of new immune therapies and significantly improve patient survival.

Our goal is to establish and provide clinical outcomes description to nerve blocks and ablations for different pain etiologies such as chemotherapy induced neuropathy. We will Characterize g the immune response by neuroinflammatory markers in the blood before and after nerve blocks and ablations. CT-guided nerve block is performed in the relevant anatomic location such as sympathetic trunk, celiac ganglion etc. If the patient responds to treatment, nerve ablation will be performed. We measure clinical outcomes using neuropathic pain questionnaire (NPS) and life quality questionnaire (BPI). Blood samples are collected pre and following the procedure. Patients will be categorized to responders or non-responders and correlation with biomarkers will be performed.

Thermal ablation of solid tumors has become an important alternative therapy for patients who disqualify for standard surgical treatment or are in an early tumor stage. In thermal ablation, physicians destroy malignant cells using percutaneous probes that induce heating or cooling in a locally delimited region around a tumor. The main barriers for wide adoption of thermal ablation are the reported significant mismatch between expected and observed tissue damage size and the inability to visualize and control the actual tissue damage morphology in real-time. The goal in tumor ablation is full malignant tissue ablation with a safety margin of 5-10mm, while minimizing the damage to healthy tissue. This tool provides automated segmentation, planning, and intra-procedural navigation abilities. Visual information of Microwave (MW) ablation lesions during clinical liver ablation procedures could improve procedure’s efficacy, safety, and efficiency. Our research goal is establishing 3D tool for real time ablation monitoring. To that end we capture US imaging during ablation in 3D fashion and corelate it with contrast enhanced CT post ablation and long-term ablation outcome.