Srivalleesha Mallidi
Tufts University, MA·Biomedical Engineering
Cancers of the mouth and throat are usually treated by cutting them out, and surgeons remove a margin of healthy tissue — often 5 to 12 millimeters beyond the tumor — to be sure nothing is left behind. In the head and neck, that extra tissue carries a heavy price: difficulty speaking, swallowing and eating, plus changes in appearance.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
Pharmacology
- Topics
photodynamic therapy
head and neck squamous cell carcinoma
oral cavity cancer
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Synthesize and characterize Verosite nanodroplets — perfluorocarbon particles carrying the photosensitizer verteporfin, oxygen, and indocyanine green dye — and optimize their stability and light-triggered liquid-to-gas conversion.
- Measure where Verosite droplets travel in the body, how quickly they clear, and what dose is needed for photodynamic therapy in mice bearing oral cancers in the mouth, comparing tumors with high and low epidermal growth factor receptor levels.
- Test whether targeting droplets to the epidermal growth factor receptor improves tumor accumulation and photoacoustic and fluorescence imaging contrast enough to map tumor margins before and during surgery.
- Determine whether oxygen-enhanced photodynamic therapy plus fluorescence image-guided surgery reduces tumor burden, spares normal tissue, and extends survival compared with standard resection in orthotopic oral cancer models.
More about the research
Survival for head and neck squamous cell carcinoma has not improved in a decade, and added radiation or chemotherapy brings toxicity without clear benefit. This work develops a light-activated treatment that could shrink tumors enough to spare healthy tissue, and that lights up tumor borders so surgeons can see exactly what to remove.
Why it matters
Patients with oral cavity and other head and neck cancers often lose speech, swallowing or facial appearance to wide surgical margins, and survival has stalled for years. A localized treatment that shrinks tumors beforehand and marks their edges during surgery could let surgeons take less healthy tissue while lowering recurrence. Because low oxygen limits many cancer therapies, an oxygen-carrying nanodroplet could also benefit treatment of other solid tumors.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
James Peter Basilion
Case Western Reserve University, OH·Biomedical Engineering
Test whether AKRO-6qc, a probe activated by cysteine proteases, can guide tumor removal and then photothermal therapy to extend survival and prevent recurrence and metastasis in BALB/c mice with 4T1/luc breast tumors.
Theresa Guo
University of California-San Diego, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Predict and rank splice-variant-derived peptides, short protein fragments made only by tumors with abnormal RNA splicing, from head and neck squamous cell carcinoma using an established computational pipeline.
Jung-Jae Lee
University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus, CO·Chemistry
Develop near-infrared chemiluminescent and fluorescent chitosan nanoparticles that are stored cold and activated by body heat, giving a self-illuminating contrast agent that needs no external light source.
The school
Tufts University: 19 labs on PI Pages, $278M a year on research, 144 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.