Medical Biophysics

Student’s Name:  Elizabeth Huynh
Supervisor: Dr. Gang Zheng
PhD Thesis: Porphyrin Microparticles for Biological and Biomedical Applications

Lipids and porphyrins are two critical building blocks of life that have been investigated biologically and applied biomedically. Elizabeth’s research explores the self-assembly of porphyrin-lipid at the micro scale and their applications in biology and medicine. She developed two distinct microstructures, porphyrin microbubbles and giant porphyrin vesicles. Each of these studies has their own unique significant contribution to different fields.

Porphyrin microbubbles overcome the challenges of designing multimodal contrast agents in the field of contrast-enhanced imaging. Porphyrin microbubbles were developed as the first intrinsic ultrasound/photoacoustic/fluorescence contrast agent. These studies exemplify a simplified approach to the generation of multifunctional materials for cancer imaging and therapy. The response of the porphyrin microbubbles to low frequency ultrasound was investigated and discovered that they could form nanoparticles. This discovery was used to propose an alternative pathway to deliver porphyrin-based nanoparticles to solid tumors, addressing a major challenge in cancer nanomedicine.

Lastly, she developed giant porphyrin vesicles as an artificial cell/ microreactor, having impact on the fields of biology and chemistry. She discovered that laser irradiation could induce pore formation in the membrane of the giant porphyrin vesicles that then proceeded to reseal. This introduced a new method for loading and releasing cargo in cell-sized vesicles, overcoming the limitations of several current techniques. This work has far-reaching potential for microfludics, molecular biology applications.

Elizabeth’s work has been published and featured in journals such as Nature Nanotechnology and the Journal of the American Chemical Society. It has also won various local and international conference presentation awards such as at the World Molecular Imaging Congress, the Topical Meeting of the Optical Society of American and the annual departmental research symposium (James Lepock Symposium). Her research was supported by the Dr. J.R. Cunningham Graduate Fellowship in Cancer Research and the CIHR Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarship.

Elizabeth is currently a resident in the Harvard Medical Physics Residency Program. She aspires to be a clinical medical physicist and scientist to drive the forefront of innovation in developing new techniques and technology to ultimately make a difference for all cancer patients.