I’m an engineer, but I get to work with scientists who pursue cancer biology and immunology. Having a comprehensive cancer center is a fantastic resource for reasons like this.
Irene Georgakoudi, PhDImagine being the first in your family to go to college, with parents who "had to begin work with only an elementary school education." That is reality for biomedical engineer Irene Georgakoudi, PhD. Fortunately, her uncle, a teacher in Greece, provided mentorship that eventually led Irene to a full scholarship to Dartmouth College as an undergraduate. “An amazing opportunity," she describes. Arriving in the United States from Greece as an international student would only be the first challenge Irene would overcome. “I failed my very first physics exam,” she recalls. “There was a question about a roller coaster—I had no idea what a roller coaster was!”
She credits her undergraduate advisor, physics professor Michael Sturge, for recentering her. “‘Don't worry. You're smart. You're getting used to your classes. You're going to do great,’ he told me.” He advised that she work with a tutor and get more “into the spirit” of what these tests are about. “Sure enough, I did much better and graduated in the top of my class,” she says.
Having found her groove, Irene spent her undergraduate years in Sturge's lab, working hands-on with fancy big laser spectroscopy systems and "tiny little laser diodes, figuring out how to hook them up and get them to glow," she reflects. The laser light she produced in the dark basement of Dartmouth’s Wilder Hall was actually the spark that ignited a career.
Dartmouth's atmosphere deeply influenced Irene. Even after graduate school at the University of Rochester and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and two decades working at Tufts University, she still jumped at the opportunity to return to Dartmouth, setting up her lab in the buzzing hub where academic prowess meets innovative patient care: Dartmouth Cancer Center (DCC).
A special place for breakthrough research
Today, Irene is co-director of DCC's Translational Engineering in Cancer (TEC) Research Program and a professor at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering. The distinct close-knit environment at DCC and the ability to have an engineering lab in a hospital (Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center) “is exceptional,” Irene says. “It truly enables moving research tools from the lab directly to patients.”
Having experienced an urban setting with a medical center 20 minutes away from her lab, she finds that here, the connection is seamless, as is DCC’s strong support in funding collaborations between scientists and clinicians. “I’m an engineer, but I get to work with scientists who pursue cancer biology and immunology. Having a comprehensive cancer center is a fantastic resource for reasons like this.”
Irene describes TEC as bridging the gap between pressing medical challenges and engineering solutions, especially in cancer. TEC is particularly well-known worldwide for its optical surgical guidance and radiotherapy programs. "Having a forum in which you can hear what clinicians need is incredibly useful for engineers, so we can design solutions that are useful in the clinic,” she says.
Detecting and monitoring cancer like never before
At the heart of Irene’s own engineering research lab is the development of tools that use our body's intrinsic fluorescence, or “natural glow,” to understand how tissues work and spot what goes wrong during illness and disease. The catch is that this natural glow is only observable with specific illumination and detection techniques. And that’s where her lasers come in.
One of her projects aims to improve the ability to find metastases, or cancer spread, in people with ovarian cancer, by developing a thin microscope that can produce high-resolution images of new lesions. Armed with excellent preliminary data, Irene has partnered with Dartmouth Health gynecologic oncologist Ivy Wilkinson-Ryan, MD, to pursue funding from the American Cancer Society.
Cervical pre-cancer detection is another project Irene has worked on for many years. Collaborating with Ilana Cass, MD, gynecologic oncologist at DCC and chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Dartmouth Health, Irene and her team have been working on a non-invasive microscopic imaging approach to find pre-cancerous spots.
“Women have way too many biopsies, taken without any anesthesia. I have no idea why we have not come up with better ways to take those biopsies, but we haven't. We need to do better,” Irene commits.
In addition, she wants to get patients who have undergone CAR-T cell therapy home sooner, by figuring out how CAR-T and B cells (white blood cells that make antibodies) interact.
“Many of these patients come from hours away and have to stay at the hospital or a nearby hotel for a couple of weeks because we don't have really good ways of monitoring them non-invasively,” Irene explains. She is working on a portable device that may ultimately be used to monitor patients remotely, so that patients who are doing well and not likely to develop adverse reactions could go home earlier.
Life outside the lab
When she's not immersed in science, Irene is probably outdoors—hiking, skiing, and swimming. Loving the outdoor recreation northern New England is known for, she does admit that there’s nothing like swimming in the Mediterranean Sea of her native Greece. She's also a big fan of cooking, good food, and good wine, and just hanging out with friends. “Both of my kids are now back in Greece, so I travel,” she adds.
Irene has always looked ahead, but what she sees now looks a little different than her first experience here. “I hope I can help students in the same way my advisor helped me, to push their careers forward," she says. In the meantime, she is channeling her self-declared “passion for lasers” into cutting-edge advancements at the place that makes it all possible. “In the short amount of time that I've been here, I've been in contact with a lot of people, and clearing the path that will push 20 years of lab work into the hands of clinicians and patients who need it the most.”