Two professors at the UH Cullen College of Engineering earned a $200,000 Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program (PRMRP) Discovery Award from the U.S. Department of Defense to further explore a quantitative assessment technique for systemic sclerosis (SSc). The autoimmune disorder is characterized by thickening of soft tissues in the body caused by accumulations of collagen.
Chandra Mohan, the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen endowed professor of biomedical engineering, and Kirill Larin, professor and director of the graduate biomedical engineering program, have developed a novel non-invasive technique to assess elasticity of body tissues in mice and, eventually, humans. The technology, called phase-stabilized swept source optical coherence elastography (PhS-SSOCE), is allowing to image tissues with micrometer spatial resolution and sense nanometer-amplitude displacements.
“When not diagnosed and treated early, systemic sclerosis can be dangerous, and even fatal, attacking internal tissues such as breathing passageways, lungs, and the renal and intestinal tracts,” Mohan said. “We have shown that our method is capable of early detection of thickened skin in mice, and our idea now is to further explore ways to objectively assess degrees of disease involvement.”
Currently, levels of tissue thickness assessed in clinics are relatively subjective with the Rodnan total skin score, the gold standard that measures multiple sites on the body and tallies a score that typically varies from one physician to the next. Technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging and ultrasound have also been tested with varying levels of success.
“We need to produce a metric to accurately diagnose and stage the disease based on mechanical and optical properties of the skin,” Larin said. “The current methods are not capable of objectively assessing progression of the disease or the patient responses to therapies.”
With the developed technology, Mohan and Larin have successfully applied a quantitative method in vivo and in vitro for determining elasticity changes caused by SSc in the skin of mice. Their next objective is to assess and monitor skin elasticity of mice with SSc using the new technique over time and to compare those results to assessments of skin elasticity in mice with SSc using the traditional skin score method. They intend to begin with straightforward skin lesions before they tackle more difficult assessments of internal organs using minimally invasive probes.
Their goal is to extend the research to patients with systemic sclerosis, in collaboration with Dr. Shervin Assassi, associate professor of rheumatology at UT Health Science Center in Houston, who is also a lead investigator on this grant. He plans to perform cross-sectional analyses of skin samples from patients with and without SSc using both novel PhS-SSOCE and traditional Rodan total skin score assessment methods. After they prove the feasibility of their research, they could potentially extend the use of this novel technology to other skin and autoimmune diseases.