Abstract
Tissue oxygenation has drawn considerable attentions in biomedical- as well as life-science because its abnormality is known to increase the severity of various diseases. For example, tumor hypoxia, which is caused by both the accelerated proliferation of cancer cells and the limited distance that molecular oxygen can diffuse from functional tumor blood vessels, has been reported to induce invasive, metastatic, and angiogenic potencies of malignant cancers. One of the gold standards for detecting hypoxic cells in living organisms is immunohistochemical staining of tissue sections using a hypoxia marker, pimonidazole. Another gold standard is an optical imaging strategy using hypoxia-dependent function of a transcription factor, HIF-1 (hypoxia-inducible factor 1). I would introduce the principle of these two strategies and demonstrate our latest data on the spatial-temporal dynamics of hypoxic cells in living mice.
