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Job Description
The Institut Langevin seeks an outstanding candidate to conduct research on the delivery and activation of drugs with ultrasound. This postdoctoral fellowship involves developing the ultrasonic and microfluidic solutions to generate and vaporize on-demand ultrasound sensitive microdroplets. It will require experimentations both in-vitro and in-vivo in a strongly multidisciplinary environment (acoustics, fluid mechanics, chemistry and pharmaceutics). The candidates will touch these various aspects from the biomedical engineering perspective in close collaboration with chemists and biologists.
This project tries to address the inadequacy of treatment for multiple metastasis. Indeed, physical targeting therapy methods lack the precision required to treat lesions while sparing adjacent healthy tissue. Biological targeting, such as chemotherapy, have dose-limiting side-effects. Recent advances in drug-delivery with ultrasound allows chemotherapy to be released precisely at the tumor site with a millimetric precision. This could address metastasis detected by the radiologist one by one during a single, image-guided therapy session. However, ultrasound sensitive carriers, which release chemotherapy with such a spatial specificity, suffer from unspecific release. We hypothesize that this issue can be solved by creating the chemotherapy in-situ rather than just delivering it.
Ultrasound-Induced Chemotherapy can be performed by confining prodrugs in ultrasound-sensitive carriers and delivering them where activating enzyme are presents. We previously demonstrated that a chemical reaction can be piloted with an ultrasound scanner and that highly potent cytotoxic compound can be activated with the focus of an ultrasound pulse. In this project, we wish to demonstrate this concept of ultrasound-induced chemotherapy in an animal model of implanted and metastatic tumor.
Job Requirements
A PhD in health technology, biomedical engineering, applied physics (acoustics or fluid mechanics) or biochemistry completed within the last 5 years. Experience with microfluidics, Matlab and animal experiments very favorable. Frequent mission to Poitiers implied (site team 2 of collaborative project). Fluency in French a plus.
Please include the names of two people, including you thesis adviser, who will provide letters of recommendation, and email a copy of your CV to Olivier Couture at olivier.couture@espci.fr
Description of Wave Physics for Medicine team at Institut Langevin :
The Wave Physics for Medicine team (Inserm U979), part of Institut Langevin, is located in the centre of Paris near Bastille. It employs a total of 40 permanent researcher, postdoc and PhD students under the direction of Mickael Tanter. Our team made many contributions in the field of medical ultrasound. For instance, we introduced shear-wave elastography imaging, which resulted in the creation of SuperSonic Imagine, a startup with more than 100 employees. We also introduced functional ultrasound imaging (Macé et al., 2011), which highlights the activity of the brain using ultrafast imaging. We first demonstrated ultrasound super-resolution and recently implemented the technique in the rat brain (Errico et al. Nature, 2015).
References :
1. Couture O, et al (2014) ”Review of ultrasound mediated drug delivery for cancer treatment : updates from pre-clinical studies” Transl Cancer Res
2. Bezagu M, et al (2014) « High spatiotemporal control of spontaneous reactions using ultrasound-triggered composite droplets”, Journal of the American Chemical Society
3. Couture O et al. (2012). "In-vivo targeted delivery of large payloads with an ultrasound clinical scanner" Medical Physics
4. Couture O, et al. (2011). "Ultrasound internal tattoing". Medical Physics