Mechanical traits of cancer include elevated solid stress as well as drastic and highly heterogeneous changes in intrinsic mechanical tissue properties. While solid stress elicits mechanosensory signals in favor of tumor progression, mechanical heterogeneity promotes cell unjamming and metastatic spread. This reductionist physical view of tumorigenesis and malignant transformation provides the framework in which tumor aggressiveness can be understood and harnessed as a novel in-vivo imaging marker. MRE is emerging as the method of choice for the biomechanical characterization of tumors in patients. In this talk, technical developments, basic results and clinical applications of MRE in cancer will be presented.

C.V. :
Ingolf Sack is a chemist, biophysicist and imaging scientist from Charité – Universitätsmedizin of Berlin (Department of Radiology, Germany). He graduated in chemistry at Freie Universität Berlin and received his PhD in solid-state NMR spectroscopy. After postdoctoral stays in Israel and Canada, he founded the Elastography Research Labs at Charité, where he pursues developments and applications in time-harmonic elastography.

Bibliographie récente :
Sack, I. Magnetic resonance elastography from fundamental soft-tissue mechanics to diagnostic imaging. Nat Rev Phys (2022) doi : 10.1038/s42254-022-00543-2.
Streitberger, K.J., Lilaj, L., Schrank, F., Braun, J., Hoffmann, K.T., Reiss-Zimmermann, M., Kas, J.A. & Sack, I. How tissue fluidity influences brain tumor progression. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 117, 128-134 (2020).
Shahryari, M., Tzschatzsch, H., Guo, J., Marticorena Garcia, S.R., Boning, G., Fehrenbach, U., Stencel, L., Asbach, P., Hamm, B., Kas, J.A., Braun, J., Denecke, T. & Sack, I. Tomoelastography Distinguishes Noninvasively between Benign and Malignant Liver Lesions. Cancer Res 79, 5704-5710 (2019).