2020/06/30
Keio University School of Medicine
A research group led by Assistant Professor Nobuyuki Tanaka and Professor Mototsugu Oya of the Department of Urology, Keio University School of Medicine, and Professor Per Uhlén of the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, has developed a novel cancer imaging method, DIIFCO (Diagnosing In situ and Immuno-Fluorescence-labelled Cleared Onco-samples). By combining 3D light-sheet microscopy with tissue-clearing techniques, this method enables the analysis of the spatial distribution of protein/RNA expression throughout the three-dimensional tumor space at the single-cell level.
Conventional histological approaches involved thinly slicing (two-dimensionalizing) the obtained tumor tissue to analyze protein and gene expression. Analyses using these methods resulted in the loss of detailed 3D tumor information within the cancer microenvironment. The DIIFCO method, using 3D light-sheet microscopy, detects target molecules at high, single-cell resolution from the surface to the deep interior of a cleared tissue mass, visualizing them as a three-dimensional image. Furthermore, it combines tissue clearing with proprietary immunostaining and in situ hybridization methods to simultaneously analyze protein and RNA expression. By integrating the latest microscopy with multiple tissue-processing technologies, this method achieves simultaneous protein/RNA expression analysis for each of the hundreds to tens of millions of cells within a tumor, all while preserving the tumor's three-dimensional structure.
This imaging method visualizes at the protein/RNA level the three-dimensional and layered structures of tumor vasculature and the cellular niche—the environment that sustains cells—which were previously not well understood. This has revealed, for the first time in the world, detailed images of the cancer microenvironment. This technique can also be applied to preserved tissues after pathological diagnosis, and future clinical applications are expected, such as in cancer diagnosis and treatment selection.
The results of this research were published in the British scientific journal "Nature Biomedical Engineering" on June 29, 2020 (Eastern Time).
For the full press release, please see below.