Vladimir Ponomarev, MD, PhD

I am a physician-scientist who focuses on the development of new multimodal imaging approaches for specific applications, such as sequential in vivo imaging studies in cancer biology, cancer immunotherapy, and radiation sciences.

The goal of my research is to investigate the role of dynamic gene expression imaging in tumor biology and therapy using noninvasive imaging. Specifically, my studies focus on imaging the activity of key signaling pathways involved in tumor proliferation and function influenced by tumor microenvironment. My primary aim is to develop widely applicable methods for in vivo, noninvasive monitoring of molecular-biological processes in cancer-specific cell therapies and to monitor their efficacy using multimodality molecular imaging approaches, including optical, magnetic resonance, and nuclear techniques.

My research aims to develop (a) new approaches for repetitive in vivo optical, nuclear, and magnetic resonance imaging of the fate of cancer-specific immune cells after their adoptive transfer for antitumor immunotherapy (conducted initially in animals and then in patients); (b) novel assessments of targeted drug therapies based on imaging of specific signal transduction pathways pre- and post-treatment, with the goal of rapid translation into relevant clinical studies; and (c) new multimodal genetic reporter systems for different imaging technologies to be combined during the course of the same study and in a way that harnesses the best features and utilities of each of the modalities.