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Kimberly Kelly: Hi everyone and welcome back to our molecular imaging and biology podcast. I am your host and the editor-in-chief of the journal, Kimberly Kelly. And just a reminder, MIB is the flagship journal of the WMIS, ESMI, and FASMI So
Jim Delikatny: What's the
Kimberly Kelly: all of you members out there, we really get excited about your submissionS. So please think about submitting and publishing with us. Today it is an incredible pleasure. To introduce someone that I have known for quite a long time. We sat we sat on study section together. and and we're deep in the trenches. so it's my pleasure to introduce Jim Delikatny So Jim, welcome to our podcast and please tell the viewers, listeners a little something about yourself.
Jim Delikatny: Well, thanks Kim. It's it's lovely to see you as always and I'm I'm very happy to be here. my name's Jim Delikatny I'm professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania. I've been here for I think twenty six years as of this year. I my research focuses on optical imaging. Fluorescence optical imaging, specifically in two major areas. One is the development of new contrast agents and in fact new fluorophores for targeting cancer, and translating those as far as we can take them towards human studies. and the second area is the development of new fluorophores in the shortwave infrared range, which give us greater depth penetration, higher resolution, and hopefully have great applications in in advancing that field forward. I should also mention that we are one of our fluorescent agents is is preparing to go into a phase one clinical trial. So we're quite excited to
Kimberly Kelly: Wow, that that is truly impressive. It's hard to translate things. And so getting a fluorophore into the clinic is really fantastic. So Jim, you and I have known each other for a long time, I think like 20 years now. What is the biggest difference you've seen in the field? I mean, from optical imaging from 20, 30 years ago until now?
Jim Delikatny: So we remember that it's only thirty years ago that biolumin bioluminescence came on the scene from the first contag papers. And that led to the development of the xenogen scanner and
Kimberly Kelly: Mm.
Jim Delikatny: and all of the growth in bioluminescence. And then fluorescence imaging sprang out of that because we we had the ability to image. but right from the beginning of that time there was a lot of innovation in the form of Cathepsin activated probes, and was early realized the power of near infrared imaging. What's happened in the last twenty, twenty-five years is that we've been able to not only develop a library of different probes that have different targets in place, but we've also been able to watch the translation of these probes towards clinical medicines And part of the the push there was been the observation that's that surgeons made that they could use these probes during an an operation, wearing goggles or using a camera to delineate tumor margins and find micrometastases. So we went from this very mouse-oriented space into this very translational space, and we're now at a point where two well, there's been three FDA approvals over the last three years and and many optical agents in in phase one, two and three clinical trials.
Kimberly Kelly: So the FDA approvals were all they all in the cancer kind of margin space?
Jim Delikatny: Yeah, two of them were for the same compound, CYTALUX developed by On Target by Philip Low, who passed away this year.
Kimberly Kelly: Mm, unfortunately, a great loss.
Jim Delikatny: and one was for ovarian cancer and the other was for non small cell lung cancer. And then Lumicell got their probe approved for breast cancer margins just last year.
Kimberly Kelly: Wow. Wow. So looking forward, what do you think the ne the field is lacking or really needs in order to really move forward?
Jim Delikatny: From the surgical perspective?
Kimberly Kelly: From any perspective, I mean just what are you really excited about? Like what would be an amazing just discovery random thing?
Jim Delikatny: I I think you know when you go to WMIC every year, there's always a large portion of optical abstracts there. And I I really think WMIC is the home for FLUORESCENCE optical imaging. And i every year it amazes me the new probes that people come out with and the new targets.
Kimberly Kelly: Mm-hmm.
Jim Delikatny: I I think that field is very robust and alive. I think part of the role of WMIC is actually helping people to go beyond the mouse. You know. bigger than the mouse. so I'm not worried about that part of it at all. as I said earlier, I w I'm really excited about the shortwave infrared space because of the ability to really, you know, functionally transform what optical imaging is. It it goes beyond that kind of blobography that we we all know and love. And and you can actually I mean we have produced and other people as well some very, very nice high resolution vascular images.
Kimberly Kelly: Wow.
Jim Delikatny: And you also have factors like when you get out beyond 900 nm in fluorescence, your your background, your autofluorescence just completely disappears. So you have no more autofluorescence problems the background's completely black. So that's kind of what excites me at the moment is the is the push into that area.
Kimberly Kelly: Yeah, so how did you guys go from blobography to that high res those were your words, not mine. I'm
Jim Delikatny: I know it's
Kimberly Kelly: just I'm just parroting. But how did you go from that to the the higher resolution?
Jim Delikatny: Well, the thing that happens above about 900 nm is that as I said, autofluorescence drops off, but so so does tissue scattering. So light has a very a much higher propensity to penetrate through tissue and not scatter. And so that way you can get higher resolution images. And if you think as an analogy what night vision goggles do when you they're in approximately the same wavelength range. you put on night
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vision goggles and you can see through fog. That
Kimberly Kelly: Yeah.
Jim Delikatny: that's exactly what we're doing. We're kind of seeing through fog. So
Kimberly Kelly: Wow. Wow. And did that did you so not only did you have to make the new optical agents, which you know is a lot of chemistry and things, but did you need new instrumentation or is it new filters? Like what's
Jim Delikatny: Yeah.
Kimberly Kelly: the what's the technical developments?
Jim Delikatny: Right, so you need you need new equipment and you need to move from the sort of CCD camera, CMOS camera, into what they call the ingaas cameras, the indium gallium arsenide cameras,
Kimberly Kelly: Mm.
Jim Delikatny: which have high detection efficiencies above nine hundred nanometers. And they for a long time were classified military technology, again because of the night vision goggles and it's only about a decade ago that they were released into the public space. and even still from the US there's a lot of export restrictions on where that technology can be transported to. And so when they first hit the market they were really, really expensive. eighty, hundred thousand dollars just for the camera
Kimberly Kelly: Wow. That's there's not a grant that I've written that has that much room.
Jim Delikatny: No, th the it was prohibitive. But now they've come down quite a bit and there's there's three or four marketers out there, that have pretty pretty good systems that come in, you know, at the sort of price of an optical scanner, which is under three hundred thousand dollars.
Kimberly Kelly: Wow, that that is that is really huge. I mean, I remember even like some of the first fluorophores, like I mean, being in the Weissleder group, you know, like those CATHEPSIN autoactivated protease kind of probes and things. So, and you're right, it was a whole bunch of blobs. I think we're even not as good a resolution as like pet, even right. And so The high resolution is is really, really super exciting. So you mentioned WMIS and WMIC. I always see you there at WMIC. And we got to take a tour of the grounds in Alaska at the Gala.
Jim Delikatny: The pocket.
Kimberly Kelly: so it's always fun to catch up with you. And you've been involved in WMIS and actually in the MIB journal for a long time. so Do you wanna talk about your involvement and and what you love about the society?
Jim Delikatny: So I think I started way back in SMI.
Kimberly Kelly: Yeah.
Jim Delikatny: the St. Louis meeting, which I think was like 2004
Kimberly Kelly: Mm-hmm.
Jim Delikatny: And then by 2008 2009 I was a regular. I think I've been to almost every meeting since I was there through the merger. it's always felt like home to me. It's it's it's a place of incredible innovation. I I've said before, there's always a little bit of Star Trek when you show up at at the
Kimberly Kelly: Yeah.
Jim Delikatny: WMIC.
Kimberly Kelly: that that's such a good thing. Lisa should make Lisa Baird, the WMIS CEO, she should make marketing material with Star Trek on it if it didn't violate copyrights. Yeah.
Jim Delikatny: have a little little chevron on them. but it it's also been an incubator for a lot of technologies. both r radiotherapy, radiotheranostics, for certainly for optical imaging. and it it and it's been an incubator that allowed these fields to grow and and a lot of them now are like translating into clinical space and and new technologies are coming into WMIS.
Kimberly Kelly: Mm-hmm.
Jim Delikatny: Which makes it even more exciting to just watch watch the continued growth.
Kimberly Kelly: Yeah, in at MIB, we get really excited about publishing new instrumentation, new technologies, new probes. you don't have to convince the editorial board in MIB that these are that this field is is critically important and the innovations definitely find a home there. So I'm really excited to be able to announce, that Jim is on The slate as one of the people that you can vote for as president of WMIS. so well-deserved nomination Jim so what is your platform? Like what do you wanna see, what do you wanna do to move WMIS forward?
Jim Delikatny: Okay, well first I I would like to say that, you know, what when I was asked to do this, you get nominated by the by the nominating committee in conjunction with the board. And first I'd like to say that this is an incredibly great honor for me to be able to serve the society like this. I've I've been involved in society in a number of ways throughout the years. sat on the program committee, I I chaired the education committee. I've I've run the optical surgical navigation interest groups and workshops for
Kimberly Kelly: Mm-hmm.
Jim Delikatny: we always have a workshop at the meeting. and I'm currently on the awards committee and I'm and and I'm a fellow we became fellows the the same
Kimberly Kelly: Yeah.
Jim Delikatny: same year. so
Kimberly Kelly: Well, and and you're also a section editor of the journal, which is the society's journal. So your your service list is impressive.
Jim Delikatny: And and that's part of as I said before, I just love it as a as an innovation space and as an as an incubator space for technologies. I think the science as we move forward in WMIC is strong. I believe it to be strong. I I think we can reach out and adopt new areas of science that are up and coming. An example would be like NAMS, the new methodologies.
Kimberly Kelly: Mm-hmm.
Jim Delikatny: if you want to cut mice out of your research, there's no better way to do that with than using molecular imaging. And a lot of the sort of like spatial proteomics, you know, all of these things are imaging methods that we can adopt and foster and and and put forward. So I'm not worried
Kimberly Kelly: Yeah.
Jim Delikatny: about the science part.
Kimberly Kelly: And just for just to let everybody know, we do have those categories. So if you have a NAMS model, or you're integrating spatial proteomics with transcriptomics, all those things, we do have a category for it.
mm-hmm.
Jim Delikatny: Perfect. Perfect. I I think as the society moves forward, we face a number of challenges right now. one of them is, you know, visa uncertainty. And
Kimberly Kelly: Mm-hmm.
Jim Delikatny: you know, the society makes most of its revenue from the annual meeting. And so with things like visa uncertainty and and travel reluctance, it's it's harder to get people to come to the meeting. the society has done a lot of things like to have the the webinars and which are very effective. But there's nothing that replaces that real in-person contact and the ability to talk to somebody about their science. I think we are large supporters of junior scientists and this is something that I would like to see grow in this uncertain time where you might not have the money next year to send your student to a meeting. It would be nice To have an in enhanced student stipend program to keep the meeting alive like that. I would like to see that happen. And also to see more junior people involvement in the meetings in in the communities and and all that sort of thing. So I think that's very important.
Kimberly Kelly: So you've got mentorship, innovation, visas.
Jim Delikatny: so a another area that we've dabbled in but never really taken all that seriously is you know, we have a we have a really good involvement of industry within the society. To the point even where some of our industry members h head up interest groups. And so they're they're very involved and I I would like to foster that and expand the involvement of industry in our societies, especially within the aspects of these new technologies that are being developed. And I think we need to explore more the the option of bringing in and talking to regulatory people for translational development. And two years, three years ago, Summer Gibbs and I organized one of the workshops where we had a whole session where members of the FDA came in. Members of FDA were very pleased with what they saw in the society and I think we should go and try to make that a regular type of interaction between the society and the regulatory agencies. and quite often as part of these workshops we'll have sub workshops where we bring in people from industry and regulatory agencies to talk about how you translate things, not only how you translate them but how you how you get them reimbursed and all of these things that we don't think about as scientists, right?
Kimberly Kelly: Right.
Jim Delikatny: And then the
Kimberly Kelly: Yeah, and those things are really critical. like if you are doing things and they're not aligned with the regulatory agency, then you either have to redo something, or you know, it's it's really hard to to get the working capital to be able to do it if you're if you're really not aligned. And the FDA is very much like reviewers and things. You don't get to tell the FDA no, that you're that you're not gonna do something. they they very much are the arbiters of what you will and will not do. So being aligned right from the beginning is is really important. But on the other side, you mentioned they get to see some of the things that we're doing. And so working in concert with them really helps us to be able to translate faster. and more cost effectively because if they don't know what's going on or what the limitations are, it it's not likely that a lot of those FDA those regulators will have seen some of the the technologies that we're talking about. And so they receive an education too. And that's also to our benefit and ultimately to the patient's benefit. So I I love that, Jim, that bringing in more industry because the industry is gonna have the capital to actually make the instrumentation or make the tracers or make the contrast agents, whatever it is, that will be commercially available. I mean, when you're I I I was running a company developing a drug, the manufacture of these things is a whole separate science of itself. And Those kind of things can't be done. They're difficult to do in a university laboratory. And so being very forward-facing with industry partners and regulatory agents gets you that much closer to bench to bedside. and I like to say not just bedside, because that's the clinical trials, which is amazing in itself, but actual community dissemination.
Jim Delikatny: Yes. Yes. And so if you're somebody who's developed a probe in your lab and the probe is very promising and you don't know where to go for that, it would be nice to have an area where there's people you can go and ask questions. How did you do this? Who should I talk to? What should I do next? What shouldn't I do next is even more important.
Kimberly Kelly: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. and then also that part of more and more of our members are getting interested in being entrepreneurial. and and so how I get a lot of those questions because I was CEO and raised about forty five million dollars, forty of it from venture capital. And how do you even go about meeting people and and doing that, even putting together a business plan at a pitch and things? So the WMIS is really starting to put some of that together too. And the program last year as part of the educational, Marty Pomper led some of those discussions on entrepreneurship and things. So yeah, Jim, I mean that is really the future of our society.
Jim Delikatny: Yes. And as you know from experience, it's almost impossible to translate something on an NIH budget. You need you need the entrepreneurship.
Kimberly Kelly: Yeah.
Jim Delikatny: You need to get the venture capital in place.
Kimberly Kelly: Right, exactly. Yeah. I was making an antibody based drug and it was something like nine million dollars five years ago just to manufacture, right? And it takes two years. So it's I it not not anything the university has for pockets of money. and so there's that valley of death, right? From you got this great concept to now manufacture talks. So all the IND enabling things. Are expensive, but they're not
exciting to the NIH. And so that's
Jim Delikatny: Right. Cool.
Kimberly Kelly: that's really where the infusion of capital has to come in.
Jim Delikatny: Yeah. And and then the the other area is one that I don't think we've explored that much, but I I think maybe we should get more involved in advocacy and in lobbying. We we we have a you know there are a lot of societies that send people to Washington they have a presence you know, deal lobbying with government officials and I I and I wanna explore that space within the WMIS as well. And I know that Lisa Baird has had experience in this so maybe we can start some sort of lobby procedure and or partner with other societies.
Kimberly Kelly: Yeah.
Jim Delikatny: this th there was a recent bill, proposed bill that came out that many scientists wrote into the government, you know, with comments and and
Kimberly Kelly: Mm-hmm.
Jim Delikatny: and I think that w we can do more in that sphere.
Kimberly Kelly: Yeah. No, I I think you're exactly right. I did some of that work with other societies on the biology front, the cancer front. it was really exciting. I didn't think I would be as as like cooled out, right, by walking the halls of Congress. And I absolutely was. It was it was really impressive. and it also it gives everybody a chance to see why we're important. And especially in this day and age of mistrust in experts and science, being able to get some of these concepts out there and really advocate for why medical research and innovation in the US is so critically important for the health of our citizens, but also for the economy, for a lot of things. yeah, that's that's definitely an area that that all scientists should really think about doing. So in these last few minutes, Jim, to bring up the personal. So everybody out there, I don't know if you know this, but Jim is actually in a band. and he actually does play real gigs and everything. And I got to say gig on this podcast. So I'm I'm so excited. So Jim, what do you play? What kind of music? Like.
Jim Delikatny: So, y you know, I I my primary instrument is the clarinet and I've been a clarinet player since I was eleven. and that's the primary place where I play. So I play a lot in sort of symphonic winds type groups. we played an outdoor summer concert last night at Rose Tree Park. We played the 1812 Overture, you know, that kind of thing.
Kimberly Kelly: Yeah.
Jim Delikatny: We played Stars and Stripes Forever. we do all that. And then when I'm home I I like to say I'm a a a a bad guitar player and a worse piano player and And my my my basement love at the moment is the drums. I'm teaching myself how to play the drums.
Kimberly Kelly: Wow, that is impressive. So one of my favorite
Jim Delikatny: And I'm the drummer. I'm John Bonham. I'm Keith Moon. I'm you know the I'm the rock star drummer.
Kimberly Kelly: Okay. so one of my favorite classical pieces ever is George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. And it starts out with that very sexy clarinet
Jim Delikatny: Yes that.
Kimberly Kelly: note that that keeps going and then it builds. So what is your absolute favorite piece to play?
Jim Delikatny: My absolute favorite piece. I love a lot of the Russians. I love playing Tchaikovsky. I love playing Shostakovich. that sort of thing. And because I l I really love that big symphonic boom crash kind of stuff. I also love Bernstein. Leonard Bernstein. there's a
Kimberly Kelly: No.
Jim Delikatny: piece called Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, which is absolutely delightful to play. So and
Kimberly Kelly: I'm gonna have to check that out.
Jim Delikatny: I love Rhapsody in Blue.
Kimberly Kelly: it's one of my one of my all time favorites. So in high school I played the flute and a little bit of the oboe. and you know but we we got a chance to at least play some of the opening of Rhapsody in Blue and
Jim Delikatny: Yeah.
Kimberly Kelly: it's always stuck with me. my high school music teacher, Mr. Wesley Ecker did a great job. So
Jim Delikatny: Mm.
Kimberly Kelly: just a shout out there to high school music teachers everywhere. But
Jim Delikatny: They they need to survive. They
Kimberly Kelly: They do, they do. And there's a a really nice correlation, I think, that's been held up between music playing and and the math and sciences and things. So but but we do it just for fun, right?
Jim Delikatny: And so just as a plug, I've been the president of one of my groups, the Pennsylvania Symphonic Winds, I've been the president for the last four years. So I have presidential experience.
Kimberly Kelly: Okay.
Jim Delikatny: And I also have experience in fundraising in that space. So I'm the perfect candidate to lead the society that I that I love so much.
Kimberly Kelly: Well, with that, I think we can say goodbye to you for today, but we will definitely see you at WMIC in Salt Lake City. So
Jim Delikatny: Yeah.
Kimberly Kelly: everybody, the as I've mentioned several times, all of us more seasoned people are incredibly approachable. So if you see Jim out and about, say hi. and we can't wait to see you in Salt Lake. Bye, everyone.
Jim Delikatny: Okay. Bye everyone. Thank you. Thanks, Kim.