Brian Marples
University of Rochester, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Radiation is a core cancer treatment, but it must hit the tumor while sparing healthy tissue, and its side effects can last for years. This work covers two sides of that challenge.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Pharmacology
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
radiation cystitis
radiotherapy
prostate cancer
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Feb 2030
What they work on
- Provide cancer researchers with image-targeted animal irradiation, using dose-volume histogram planning and multiple integrated beams to deliver dose to tumors while sparing normal tissue, paired with confocal and multiphoton microscopy.
- Standardize imaging and radiation methods across investigators, including dose verification on all radiation platforms and newly added light-sheet microscopy, to improve the rigor of preclinical cancer studies.
- Characterize how bladder inflammation and recruitment of immune cells driven by the chemokine CCL2 cause injury after single-dose and fractionated radiation in mice, as a function of dose and irradiated volume.
- Determine how long ACE inhibitors or angiotensin receptor blockers must be given for maximal bladder protection, how they prevent progressive injury, and whether they spare tumors, using an orthotopic prostate cancer mouse model.
- Measure the release of urinary extracellular vesicles over time with nanoparticle tracking analysis as an early biomarker of radiation injury, and test whether their protein cargo triggers cell stress responses in mouse models.
- Validate urinary vesicle kinetics as a predictor of late radiation cystitis and of response to renin-angiotensin drugs, using biosamples from two clinical studies of men receiving radiotherapy for prostate cancer.
More about the research
One is a shared facility that brings precise, image-guided radiation and advanced imaging to animal studies of cancer. The other is a research project on how pelvic radiation injures the bladder and how inexpensive existing drugs might prevent that injury.
Why it matters
Men and women who receive pelvic radiotherapy for cancers such as prostate cancer can develop lasting, debilitating bladder damage with few treatments available. Cheap, well-tolerated blood-pressure drugs (ACE inhibitors and ARBs) could prevent this injury, and a urine test could flag which patients need them early. Standardized, dose-verified animal irradiation and imaging may also make preclinical cancer studies more reproducible.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Edward Graves
Stanford University, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine whether loss of the complement receptor C5aR1 broadly protects normal intestine, salivary gland and lung tissue in mice treated with fractionated and hypofractionated radiotherapy.
Peter Leary
University of Washington, WA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test in a Phase 2, single-center, randomized placebo-controlled trial whether 24 weeks of valsartan, an angiotensin receptor blocker, is safe and improves six-minute walk distance in adults with pulmonary arterial hypertension.
Rongxiao Zhang
University of Missouri-Columbia, MO·Biomedical Engineering
Build beam models for FLASH-capable linear accelerators, the machines that produce the radiation, so planning software can accurately predict the dose that ultra-high dose rate electron beams deliver.
The school
University of Rochester: 38 labs on PI Pages, $492M a year on research, 308 research doctorates a year.
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