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Vasilis Ntziachristos is a Greek American biomedical engineer, scientist, and inventor best known for his development of fundamental and translational sensing and imaging technologies for biology and medicine, based on fluorescence and optoacoustics methods.
Vasilis Ntziachristos is a Professor C4/W3 of Medicine and Electrical Engineering and holds the Chair of Biological Imaging at the Technical University of Munich. He is also the Director of the Institute of Biological and Medical Imaging at the Helmholtz Zentrum München and Director of Bioengineering at the Helmholtz Munich. [1] He is a founding member and serves on the Board of Directors at the translational oncology center TranslaTUM and has led developments leading to the foundation of the Munich School of Bioengineering (now MIBE). [2]
Ntziachristos studied electrical engineering and computer science at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, magnetic resonance as a Research Fellow at the Panum NMR Core Facility of the University of Copenhagen and at the Department of Radiology at Penn Medicine. He matriculated at the graduate program of the bioengineering department of the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed a master's degree (1998) and a PhD in bioengineering (2000). His doctoral work, entitled "Concurrent magnetic resonance imaging and diffuse optical tomography to probe breast cancer", was carried out under the supervision of Britton Chance, Arjun Yodh and Mitchell Schnall.[ citation needed ] Following graduation Ntziachristos joined the faculty ranks of Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, initially as an instructor (2001) and then as an Assistant Professor (2002) and Director of the Laboratory of Bio-optics and Molecular Imaging. In 2007, he was recruited to Munich into a joint call from the Technical University of Munich and Helmholtz Zentrum München. [3] [4]
In 2013, he founded the open-access research journal Photoacoustics, which is the only peer-reviewed journal dedicated entirely to photoacoustic (optoacoustic) research and served as its first editor until 2018. [5]
Ntziachristos is a globally recognized pioneer and entrepreneur in biomedical imaging. One focus area is the development of fluorescence molecular imaging for guiding surgical and endoscopic procedures for improving cancer detection and clinical outcome. He and his collaborators published the first translational study in 2011, whereby a targeted fluorescent agent was systemically injected in human patients to distinguish tumor cells from healthy tissue during surgery. This approach is now being validated in several clinical trials. In 2012 Ntziachristos was a founding member of SurgVision BV, a company that developed fluorescence-guidance systems for surgery and acquired in 2017 by Bracco Imaging S.p.A. [6]
Recently, Ntziachristos and colleagues have demonstrated early detection of esophageal cancer, significantly improving detection over white light endoscopy. Successful application of this performance may mean life-saving curative procedures for tens of thousands of individuals each year and healthcare savings of several billion EUR per year. [7] [8]
A second focus of Ntziachristos' research is developing optoacoustic techniques for breaking through the penetration barriers of conventional optical imaging methods. His group develops theory, hardware and computational methods for image reconstruction, spectral unmixing and information processing to bring novel solutions to unmet needs in biology and medicine. Among many inventions, he is the inventor of multispectral optoacoustic tomography (MSOT) and raster scan optoacoustic mesoscopy (RSOM), which are non-invasive imaging methods that simultaneously measure different parameters of tissue physiology and pathology non-invasively, allowing new ways to diagnose disease and monitor treatment. MSOT and RSOM are now used in a range of preclinical and clinical studies, including advancing characterization of psoriasis, [9] breast tumors, [10] metastatic melanoma [11] and inflammation in Crohn's disease. [12] MSOT has also been used to visualize metabolism within brown fat, [13] suggesting it may be effective for analyzing muscle energetics and lipid metabolism in a much simpler and more accessible way than with other techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging. These systems have been placed around the world. [14] Ntziachristos is the founder of Spear UG, which currently commercializes optoacoustic technology. He and his team also drive inventions of the world’s smallest ultrasound detector [15] , of label-free microscopy using mid-infrared optoacoustics [16] or the world’s first sensor that can detect glucose non-invasively in blood. [17]
For this volume of work he has been awarded several prestigious awards, including the 2013 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize from the German Research Foundation, considered to be the top scientific distinction in Germany, the 2015 Gold Medal of the World Molecular Imaging Society or the 2021 Innovation Award from the European Union - HaDEA. For more information on his awards see the section on Prizes and Awards. His work often appears in the press. [6] [7] [8] The 2018 anniversary report of the Technical University of Munich features a chapter on Vasilis Ntziachristos, naming him as one of the professors that have shaped the Technical University of Munich. [9]
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