We are pleased for formally welcome Mr Jacob Truong (University of Adelaide) as a student member of the Freemasons Centre for Male Health & Wellbeing.
Jacob has been awarded a FCMHW MPhil top-up scholarship to support his project being undertaken in the Prostate Cancer Laboratory at the South Australian Health & Medical Research Institite (FCMHW-SA Division).
Jacob completed a Bachelor of Science (Biomedical Science) in 2019 at the University of Adelaide. His majors werre biochemistry, microbiology and immunology.
Jacob’s Masters project is “Characterising the Dynamic Lipid Profile Changes in Prostate Cancer Recurrence.”
The focus of Jacob’s research is to identify and characterise the change in lipid composition in prostate cancer tissues using matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation mass spectrometry imaging (MALDI MSI). MALDI MSI is a sensitive and high throughput imaging technology that can detect and spatially resolve hundreds of molecules directly from tissue sections including peptides, lipids, metabolites and drugs.
A high frequency UV laser is used to irradiate tissue. The irradiation ablates the tissue generating microscopic particles and using a detector the specific mass of the particles are measured. The result of this process is a 2D profile of the location and relative abundance of all molecules in the tissue. This is different to traditional mass spectrometry techniques which analyses tissue homogenites, and immunohistochemistry (IHC) which can only detect single molecules.
From research undertaken in the Centre, dysrupted lipid metabilism is know to be associated with prostate cancer and disease aggressiveness. MALDI MSI allows the characterisation of a tissue’s whole lipid content, making MSI a potentially valuable tool for identifying the changes in lipid composition that are associated with tumour regions or molecular compositions that define low grade from high grade aggressive prostate cancer .
A cohort of tissue samples donated by 120 men treated for localised prostate cancer by radical prostatectomy are to be analysed using this MALDI MSI technique. The findings from this project may provide molecular markers that more accuractely confer increased risk of developing either reccurrent and aggressive disease, to better taailor treatment at an early stage.
The scholarship funding is generously provided by the Masonic Charities, the philanthropic arm of Freemasons of South Australia and the Northern Territory.
