Dr. Chan received her BSc and PhD degrees from The University of Hong Kong. She completed post-doctoral fellowship in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and became an Assistant Professor at Department of Radiology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (JHMI) in 2014. She joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong in 2016, and became Associate Professor in 2019. She is the deputy program leader at the department, and the Associate Director of Hong Kong Centre for Cerebro-cardiovascular Health Engineering. She is also an adjunct faculty of JHMI.
Dr. Chan's research focuses on the development of biomaterials and imaging approaches to facilitate the clinical translation of cancer therapy and cell therapy, and early diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases. She applies CEST MRI to image glucose utilization in the brain, which have implications on diagnosis and therapy in many neurodegenerative diseases, including identification of early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Her team develops techniques to effectively image and deliver drugs/cells to the brain non-invasively. She published over 67 peer-reviewed articles, including a cover article in Nature Materials, Science Advances, Theranostics, Stroke and ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces; and leading imaging journals, including NeuroImage, Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and NMR in Biomedicine.
Chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST) MRI detects the presence of millimolar concentrations of molecules in vivo. This sensitivity has made it possible to study important biomolecules, such as proteins, lipids, metabolites, as well as drugs already approved for clinical use non-invasively. It has become a robust tool in brain tumor diagnosis, which enables the identification of tumor recurrence from radiation necrosis, alterations in proteins, cellularity and IDH mutation using specific CEST contrast. Moreover, many anticancer drugs, liposomes and hydrogels have been shown to have exchangeable protons for CEST detection. In this talk, Dr. Chan will discuss the principle of CEST MRI and how it can be applied to study molecular changes in brain tumors, image anticancer drugs and their delivery to tumors. In particular, the theranostic application of hydrogel-based local brain tumor treatment. Recently, Dr. Chan’s team also demonstrated the uniqueness of glucoCEST in the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. With increasing understanding of the technical aspects and associated molecular alterations detected by CEST MRI, this young field is expected to have wide clinical applications beyond cancer diagnosis in a near future.