Collateral Damage: Investigating the Side Effects of Chemotherapeutics

Collateral Damage: Investigating the Side Effects of Chemotherapeutics

Collections: Image Award Winners, Precision Cancer Medicine

2014 Award Winner

Aprotim Mazumder, Jennifer A. Calvo, Leona D. Samson
Samson Laboratory

Koch Institute at MIT, MIT Center for Environmental Health Sciences, MIT Department of Biological Engineering, MIT Department of Biology

How much is too much? When treating cancer, it is important to balance a drug’s effectiveness at killing tumor cells with its toxicity to healthy cells elsewhere in the body.

This image of brain tissue shows Cerebellar Granule Neurons (pink), which sustain significant damage when exposed to certain DNA-damaging therapeutics, and surrounding Purkinjee cells (orange), which do not. Researchers are studying these responses to determine the cell properties and repair mechanisms that make different cell types more or less vulnerable to chemotherapy.

Video

Aprotim Mazumder shares the story behind his award-winning image.

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