Seminar - Pei-Hsun Wu

Pei-Hsun Wu

Assistant Research Scientist
Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Institute for NanoBio Technology
NCI Physical Sciences-Oncology Center
The Johns Hopkins University

Single-cell biophysical analysis for personalized medicine

Abstract

The emergence of personalized medicine has changed traditional standards for patient care and provides new opportunities for combating complex human diseases. A central goal in personalized medicine is to predict disease outcomes and design treatments based on multidimensional information acquired from the patient’s affected tissue/organ. My research focuses on investigating cell-level biophysical signatures and functional phenotypes as cancer biomarkers and studying the regulation of these phenotypes by tumor microenvironment factors and intra-tumoral heterogeneity. I investigated the use of cellular mechanical properties as a biomarker for metastatic breast cancer through pioneering intravital particle-tracking microrheology (iPTM).  Through iPTM, we were able to study the regulation of cell mechanical properties in disease-relevant microenvironments. Our results demonstrated that cells with metastatic potential have unique mechanical signatures that can change based on the context of the microenvironment. These results suggest cell mechanical properties, such as stiffness and elasticity, can be used as novel cancer biomarker. In addition to mechanical profiling of tumor cells, I investigated the use of quantitative profiling of cell morphology as an emergent readout of complex and heterogeneous cancer genomes to predict the metastatic potential of breast cancer cells. This work demonstrates that the in vivo metastatic potential of a tumor is encrypted at the single-cell level and can be predicted via quantitative morpho-profiling in vitro. Together, these findings suggest that quantitative biophysical profiling of cells offers a convenient and economical method to decipher complex genomic alterations in tumors, enabling effective classification of cancer cell subtypes for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.

Bio

Pei-Hsun Wu earned a Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering at the National Taiwan University in 2003.  With an Alumni fellowship, he moved to the University of Florida, where he earned a PhD in 2010 in Chemical Engineering for work in cellular biophysics. With a Physical Sciences in Oncology Center (PS-OC) fellowship from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), he did postdoctoral research in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University. He then joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology (INBT) as an assistant research scientist in 2014. With funding from NCI and American Heart Association (AHA), his current research focus is to develop biophysical and bioimaging informatics methods to study the tumor microenvironment and intratrumoral heterogeneity and to develop and validate novel cancer biomarkers.