Jack July

As a tumor grows and develops, new blood vessels form within it, robbing its host of nutrients and feeding back into itself an enhanced ability to continue pillaging.  Destroying the network of blood vessels supplying tumors is a theoretically plausible way to fight cancer, although it hasn’t had much success yet. Visualizing this destruction—and the efficacy of the drugs which execute it, has until now been nearly impossible.

Using a complicated network of software, microscopy, and a brilliant harnessing of the Doppler Effect created by the movement of blood cells within vessels, Harvard researchers have now pushed the depth of visualization of tumor angiogenesis to 2 millimeters, a practical light year in this type of work.  Above, the vascularization of the mouse brain, from last week’s Nature Medicine.