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2023

• December 2023: Arun Asif, Kavya Nair and Margarida Barroso presented posters on 3D tumor constructs, DMT1 and organelle distribution in triple negative breast cancer at American Society of Cell Biology (ASCB), Boston.

• October 2023: Margarida and Arun will be representing the Barroso lab in the Joint Meeting of ASMB, HCS, and ASIP: Elevating Science to New Heights, Tissue, Matrix, and Pathobiology, Salt Lake City, Utah   |   October 22-25, 2023. Margarida will present an invited talk on "Macroscopy FRET FLI Monitors Cancer Antibody Drug-Target Engagement In Vivo" in the SESSION 017: HCS - Cancer: Imaging Immuno-Oncology, Sunday, October 22, 2023. Arun Asif will present a talk on "Biofabricated Microcapsules Facilitate Formation of Matrigel-free 3D Tumor Model Alternatives" in SESSION 069: HCS with IHCS SIG - Organoids and 3-D ModelsTuesday, October 24, 2023. See photos here

• September 2023: Arun Asif will be presenting a talk entitled "3D tumor constructs as analytical tools to assess the impact of iron metabolism in cancer invasion" at the Capital District Posdoc Association Symposium.

• September 2023: Margarida presented a talk on the organelle topology profiling of metastatic cancer cells using machine learning classification approaches at the NCI Informatics Technology Cancer Research network meeting at the University of Chicago. 

• September 2023: Margarida Barroso and Javier Bravo-Cordero (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NYC) were awarded a NIH NCI ITCR/IMAT supplement (R21CA274622-02S1) to their respective R21 grants to apply organelle topology machine learning cancer cell classification to dormancy cancer cell models.

• September 2023: Congratulations to Joshua Goldwag, 4th year medical student, for successfully defending his MD distinction in research thesis on machine learning-based organelle topology cancer cell classification. Congrats Joshua and good luck with matching in a great residency program! 

• August 2023: Congratulations to Pampa Mandal for an outstanding defense of her MS thesis on the "Role of Rab4A in inter-organelle interactions and intracellular iron transport in cancerous vs non-cancerous cells"! Congrats Pampa for all your hard work and passion for science! 

• August 2023: Margarida Barroso and Xavier Intes highlighted their collaboration on the development of macroscopy fluorescence lifetime FRET (MFLI) in vivo imaging to measure target engagement in live, intact tumor xenografts, by co-presenting their work entitled "Biology meets Engineering: Quantifying Drug-target Engagement in Vivo" at FINDING YOUR INNER MODELER, NSF Workshop Year 6, University of Alabama at Birmingham. You can watch the recording here.

• August 2023: Congratulations Dr. Verma for the invited oral and poster presentations at the 2023 National Cancer Institute (NCI) Junior Investigator Meeting that will be held at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) in Philadelphia, PA on August 17-18, 2023.  

• July 2023: The latest translational research forum highlighting bench to bedside research took place on Thursday, July 13, from 4 to 5 p.m. in Huyck Auditorium, AMC. Margarida Barroso, PhD, and Sandra Shin, MD, of Albany Medical Center and Xavier Intes, PhD, of RPI, discussed their collaboration that integrates biology, state-of-the-art imaging, engineering, and clinical pathology to tackle new ways to target and treat breast cancer.

• July 2023: NIH selected for highlight our recently awarded $3.3 million R01 grant from NCI, in collaboration with the Intes lab, This grant will support the use of artificial intelligence to improve drug therapy for breast cancer treatment. 

• July 2023: We are very happy to introduce organelle topology and how it can be used as a specific cellular signature to identify and discriminate different cancer cells grown in 2D vs 3D spheroids. Read the paper published in iScience. All this is work from Ling Wang, Joshua Goldwag, and Megan Bouyea, in collaboration with Uwe Kruger and Xavier Intes for the ML/DL work. Thanks also to Jonathan Barra and all the other authors! 

• June 2023: Very exciting to announce the publication of "In vivo quantitative FRET small animal imaging: Intensity vs. lifetime-based FRET" in Biophysical Reports. Also read about our results shown as cover art for the June 14 issue of the Biophysical Reports on the BPS Blog.

• May 2023: Dr. Barroso from Albany Medical College (AMC) and Dr. Intes from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) were awarded a $3.3 million grant over five years by the National Cancer Institute to use artificial intelligence (AI) to improve targeted drug therapy in HER2-positive breast cancer treatment (AMC news).

• April 2023: Dr. Barroso and Dr. Corr (RPI) were awarded a 2-year Peter T. Rowley Breast Cancer New York State Research Grant entitled "Bioprinting of histology-grade breast tumor mimics for personalized drug screening".March 2023: Margarida participated as an faculty instructor in FRET, FLIM and Metabolic Imaging workshop at Keck Center for Cellular Imaging at University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. Margarida gave two oral presentations on Fluorescence lifetime FRET small animal in vivo imaging: 1) Comparison of intensity versus lifetime-based approaches for quantitative FRET imaging of small animals in vivo; 2) Macroscopy fluorescence lifetime FRET monitors tumor drug-target engagement in vivo. Catherine Sherry participated as a student to learn more about the intricacies of FLIM and FRET! Go here for more information on the FRET workshop at UVA.

• January 2023: Congratulations to Catherine Sherry for her best poster award at the SPIE Photonics West 2023 Multiphoton microscopy conference XIV. Also congratulations to Amit Verma for his talk at SPIE Photonics West 2023 Drug distribution conference on the role of tumor microenvironment on drug-target engagement using MFLI FRET in vivo imaging (Photos).

• January 2023: Welcome Arun Asif to the Barroso lab at AMC! Arun has joined the lab as a postdoc working on the role of endosome-mitochondria interactions in 3D tumor systems and metastatic growth. 

• January 2023: Welcome Kavya Nair to the Barroso lab at AMC! Kavya is a first-year graduate student that works on DMT1 interacting proteins and other protein candidates involved in endosome-mitochondria interactions.

2022

• December 2022: Congratulations to Jonathan Barra for his talk on the regulation of iron metabolism via DMT1-dependent endosome-mitochondria interactions and its association with metastatic capacity of breast cancer cells at the "Mitochondrial Organization and Inter-organelle Contacts" minisymposium at Cell Bio ASCB|EMBO meeting in Washington DC (Photos).

• December 2022: Margarida Barroso presented our collaborative effort with John Williams (City of Hope) to measure drug-target engagement of antibody anti-cancer drugs using in vivo macroscopy fluorescence lifetime (MFLI) Forster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) at NCI IMAT PI meeting at University of Kansas (Photos).

• September 2022: @barrosolab was awarded a R21 entitled "Artificial intelligence enhanced cancer cell classification based organelle morphology and topology". This is a multi-PI grant with Dr. Barroso (AMC) and Dr Kruger (RPI) as PIs and Dr. Lamar (AMC) and Dr. Intes (RPI) as collaborators. This R21 is part of ITCR (https://itcr.cancer.gov/).

• Spring 2022: Welcome Amit and Cassie! Amit Verma joined the @barrosolab as a postdoc in March 2022. He is working with Intes lab @RPI_BME to test the role of tumor microenvironment in drug-HER2 tumor binding using FLIM-FRET optical in vivo imaging.  Cassie Roberge joined the @barrosolab as a postdoc in June 2022. She is working with Corr lab @RPI_BME to study development of tumor heterogeneity in 3D tumor systems. 

2021

• 07/01/2021: Congratulations to Ray Abini-Agbomson for his Master thesis defense! Ray is now a Master graduate and a 1st year medical student at AMC. Wishing Ray success for the next four years of medical school! 

• 06/24/2021: Congratulations to Dr. Wang for her flash talk and poster in #elmi2021 European Light Microscopy Initiative Meeting on organelle topology as a novel breast cancer cell classifier.

• Congratulations to Dr. Barra for his oral presentations at ASBMB Experimental Biology meeting on April 29-30, 2021. 

• Dr. Jonathan Barra will present his work on the "Role of iron transporter DMT1 in endosome-mitochondria interactions and mitochondrial metabolism in breast cancer cells" at the American Association of Cancer Research Meeting. On demand starting April 10, 2021.

• Dr. Rudkouskaya will present her work on "Monitoring receptor heterodimerization along intracellular trafficking pathways using anti-HER2 therapeutic antibodies" at SPIE Photonics West (Paper 11624-12). On-demand starting 6 March.

• Dr. Tubbesing will present her work on "Raman mapping of transferrin and ferritin distributions in breast cancer cells" at SPIE Photonics West (Paper 11655-44). On-demand starting 6 March.

• 01/2021: Congrats to Alena Rudkouskaya and Jason Smith for their manuscript "Quantification of Trastuzumab-HER2 Engagement In Vitro and In Vivo", published in Molecules.

2020

• 12/15/2020: Jonathan Barra presented his work at Cell Bio Virtual ASCB-EMBO Meeting 2020 on “Role of iron transporter DMT1 in Endosome-mitochondria interactions in breast cancer cells”.

• 10/16/2020: Jonathan Barra presented his work at East–West Iron Club (EWIC) Virtual Conference on “Role of iron transporter DMT1 in Endosome-mitochondria interactions in breast cancer cells”.

• 07/25/2020: Congrats to Alena Rudkouskaya for her first-author publication in Theranostics entitled "Multiplexed non-invasive tumor imaging of glucose metabolism and receptor-ligand engagement using dark quencher FRET acceptor", see link

• 05/26/2020: Welcome to the Barroso lab: Pampa Mandal, a second-year graduate student at AMC. 

• 05/22/2020 (11am ET): Alena Rudkouskaya presented in the Women in Molecular Imaging Webinar Series on "Multiscale Quantification of Target Engagement in Breast Cancer Models Using Fluorescent Lifetime FRET Imaging", Moderator: Edward “Jim” Delikatny, PhD, Research Professor of Radiology University of Pennsylvania. Here is the recording of the webinar. 

• 05/01/2020: With support from a $2.5M grant from the @NIH’s @theNCI, Albany Medical College researcher Margarida Barroso, PhD, is collaborating with engineers from @RPI on a new bioimaging technique. Check the news here.

• 04/05/2020: Barroso lab welcomes post-doctoral fellow, Jonathan Barra-Carrasco, to Albany and AMC! Lauren Elder has also joined the lab as a research technician.

• 04/03/2020: Congratulations to Kate Tubbesing, now a post-doctoral fellow at University at Albany, for having her first-author manuscript entitled "Complex Rab4-mediated regulation of endosomal size and EGFR activation" being selected for the cover in the May issue of Molecular Cancer Research. 

• 02/28/2020: The Barroso lab is moving to a larger lab space (MR04) at AMC. Very exciting!02/27/2020: Check this CBS6 Albany story by Lynsey Smith on our "Endosome-mitochondria interactions in breast cancer" NIH grant funding.

• 02/26/2020: Margarida Barroso will give an invited lecture "Multiscale Imaging of receptor transport: Super-resolution to Optical Imaging" in the NanoBio seminar series at SUNY Polytechnic Institute, Albany, NY. 

• 02/13/2020: Kate Tubbesing PhD defense "Inside-out and outside-in regulation: how transferrin iron-release and Rab4-GTPases influence early endosome dynamics".

• 02/01-04/2020: The Barroso lab got 4 oral presentations at SPIE Photonics West, San Francisco. Alena Rudkouskaya presented "Quantification of anti-HER2 drug uptake into human breast cancer cells using fluorescence lifetime FRET imaging" on Feb 1st. Then Ling Wang presented "Heterogeneity of mitochondria morphology in breast cancer cells" on Feb 2nd. Margarida Barroso presented "Monitoring receptor-ligand interactions using fluorescence lifetime FRET imaging via deep learning" on Feb 4th. Ting Chean Khoo from the Khmaladze lab (University at Albany) presented his collaborative work with Kate Tubbesing on "Raman hyperspectral imaging of transferrin-bound iron in T47D and MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cells" on Feb 3rd.

• 01/23/2020: Congratulations to Kate Tubbesing for her first author manuscript entitled "Complex Rab4-mediated regulation of endosomal size and EGFR activation" to be published in Molecular Cancer Research

• 01/07/2020: Our collaborative work with Dr. Xavier Intes from RPI on Macroscopic Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging that was funded by R01 EB019443 will continue to be supported thanks to a new grant from NCI 1R01CA250636-01: “In vivo Macroscopic Fluorescence Lifetime Molecular Optical Imaging” (scored at 6%). This is a 4-year effort supported by a $3.1M budget. The work will benefit from a close collaboration with Dr. Xavier Michalet from UCLA and Dr. Pingkun Yan from RPI. 

• 12/2019: Our work on endosome-mitochondria interactions in breast cancer cells was funded by NCI 1R01 CA233188  (scored at 8%). This is a 5-year effort supported by a 2.88M budget. This work will benefit from close collaboration with Dr. DiPersio, Dr. Adam and Dr. Lamar from AMC and Dr. Corr from RPI. See press release from Albany Medical College.