Professor Eben Rosenthal

April 24, 2019 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm

Location: Packard 101

Talk Title: Challenges in surgical imaging: Surgical and pathological devices

Talk Abstract: Cancer is a surgically treated disease; almost 80% of early stage solid tumors undergo surgery at some point in their treatment course. The biggest gap in quality remains the high rate of tumor-positive margins in surgical resections. The biggest barrier is that only a limited amount of the tissue can be sampled for frozen section analysis (< 5%). The biggest challenge is to develop equipment to direct frozen section analysis to the most area on the specimen most likely to contain a positive margin. To this end, we developed intraoperative devices to leverage molecular imaging during and immediately after cancer resections.

Speaker’s Biography: Eben Rosenthal is a surgeon-scientist and academic leader. He is currently serving as the John and Ann Doerr Medical Director of the Stanford Cancer Center, a position he has held since July 2015. He has published over 160 peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts, authored many book chapters and published a book on optical imaging in cancer. Dr. Rosenthal has performed preclinical and clinical research on the role of targeted therapies for use to treat cancer alone and in combination with conventional therapy and has served as principal investigator on several early phase investigator-initiated and industry sponsored clinical trials in molecular oncology. He has conducted bench to bedside development of optical contrast agents to identify cancer in the operating room and led a multidisciplinary team of scientists through successful IND application to allow testing of fluorescent labeled antibodies in the clinic and operating room. These early phase clinical trials have demonstrated that this technique can visualize microscopic cancer in the operating room and may significantly improve clinical outcomes.