Newsletter from the Center for Biophotonics

Dr. Christopher Contag is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics - Neonatology, of Microbiology & Immunology and, by courtesy, of Radiology at Stanford University. He currently serves in the roles of Co-Director of the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford (MIPS, http://mips.stanford.edu/public/about.adp), Director of the Stanford Center for Innovation in In-Vivo Imaging (SCI3, http://mips.stanford.edu/public/sci3.adp), and Director of the Stanford Near Infrared Optics and Photomedicine Center. He is a member of the Stanford BioX faculty (http://biox.stanford.edu/), the immunology Program and the Stanford Cancer Center (http://cancer.stanford.edu/). His area of study focuses on understanding both the mechanisms of disease (cancer, infection and genetic diseases), and the complex genetic programs of mammalian development and stem cell biology. His group has developed methods that simultaneously reveal the nuances, and the overall picture of cellular and molecular processes in a living animal. These approaches allow for rapid assessment of the effects of antineoplastic therapies, antibiotics or antiviral drugs, revealing possible modes of action, which result in significantly more information than can be obtained using a vivisectionist approach in that the animals are living and the data is obtained in real-time.

A goal of the Contag Laboratory is to:
1. Develop tools that make the body essentially transparent for scientific discovery,
2. Use these tools to understand how pathogens cause disease and how the host organism responds to these pathogens,
3. Use these tools to understand how the immune system monitors cell transformation in cancer, and
4. Use these tools to understand the regulatory networks that control cell migration and development.

Contag's experimental approach is based on the observation that light can pass through mammalian tissues. The genes originating from fireflies and other "glow-in-the-dark" (bioluminescent) organisms serve to mark mammalian cells and pathogens. These marked entities are then used in animal models of human biology and disease, and the light that they produce is externally monitored to reveal levels of expression, growth rate, or movement within tissue and organs.

Recently, Contag et al. has revealed the kinetics of stem cell engraftment and hematopoietic reconstitution, elucidated the nature of minimal residual disease states following cancer therapy and identified tissue sites that pathogens use to evade the host immune response.

To read more about Dr. Christopher Contag, please click on
http://med.stanford.edu/profiles/Christopher_Contag/.

Lab members include:
Michael Bachmann, Yuan Cao, Tim Doyle, Patrick Eimerman, Emilio Gonzalez, Henry Haeberle, Michael Mandella, Laura Bronsart, Jonathan Hardy, Andrew Ladd, Irfan Ali Khan, Jocelyn Ko, Jonathan T.C. Liu, Wibool Piyawattanametha, Jennifer Prescher, Hyejun Ra, Tobi Schmidt, and Mark Sellmyer. To read more, please click on http://mips.stanford.edu/research/lab?lab_id=2422&ex_p=1.

Abbreviated List of Recent Publications:
1. Helms, M.W., Kemming, D., Contag, CH, Pospisil, H, Bartkowiak, K, Wang, A, Chang, SY, Buerger, H, Brandt, BH (2009). TOB1 is regulated by EGF-dependent HER2 and EGFR signaling, is highly phosphorylated, and indicates poor prognosis in node-negative breast cancer. Cancer Res69, 5049-5056.
2. Watkins, GA, Jones, EF, Shell, MS, VanBrocklin, HF, Pan, M-H, Hanrahan, SM, Feng, JJ, He, J, Sounni, NE, Dill, KA, Contag, CH, Coussens, LM, Franc, BL. (2009) Development of an optimized activatable MMP-14 targeted SPECTimaging probe. Bioorg Med Chem 17:653-659.
3. Hotson, AN, Hardy, JW, Hale, MB, Contag, CH and Nolan, GP (2009) The T cell intracellular signaling network is reprogrammed within hours of bacteremia via secondary signals. J. Immunol. 182: 7558-7568.
4. Mackanos, MA, Larabi, M, Shinde, R, Simanovskii, DM, Guccione, S, Contag, CH (2009) Laser-induced disruption of systemically administered liposomes for targeted drug delivery. J Biomed Optics 14(4): 044009.

To read more about Dr. Contag's publications, please click on
http://med.stanford.edu/profiles/frdActionServlet?choiceId=showFacPublications&fid=4036.