Sal La Cavera III

Contact

• workKing's Meadow Campus
  Lenton Lane
  Nottingham
  NG7 2NR
  UK
• Salvatore.LaCaveraIII@nottingham.ac.uk

Biography

Sal is a Nottingham Research Fellow in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Nottingham who is based in the Optics and Photonics Research Group. He develops next generation endoscopic devices for very high resolution imaging and spectroscopy for future in-vivo biopsies and disease diagnostics. Prior to his Fellowship Sal held an EPSRC Doctoral Prize in which he developed the first ever 3D cell imaging applications for his endoscopic stiffness sensing technology. He holds a PhD in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Nottingham for developing the world's first hair-thin stiffness probe which utilises time resolved Brillouin scattering. Prior to this received an MSc from the University of Nottingham in Photonic and Optical Engineering, and BS in Physics from the University of California Santa Cruz.

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0210-3102

Research Summary

Many people already know that cancer alters the stiffness of biological tissue, this is why many malignant tumours feel "stiff." Cancer science is still in the early days of characterising how… read more

Current Research

Many people already know that cancer alters the stiffness of biological tissue, this is why many malignant tumours feel "stiff." Cancer science is still in the early days of characterising how exactly stiffness plays a role in the development and treatment of cancer. There exists a fascinating paradox in the current consensus on cancer stiffness. Individual cancer cells are softer than normal, yet complex tumours and their surrounding microenvironment are stiff. How are these scales reconciled? And importantly, how can this information be used to help understand and diagnose cancer as early as possible? Current cancer mechanics are under-utilised in diagnostic procedures; e.g., palpation is a crude initial screening technique ('feeling for lumps') yet isn't up to the job of early diagnosis. State of the art mechanical imaging techniques such as atomic force microscopy provide incredible high resolution images of cellular mechanical properties, however, the process of extracting those cancer cells from a patient is destructive, costly, expensive, and time consuming.

I am developing a platform of endoscopic technologies that "feels for lumps" but on the cellular scale to help detect and characterise the stiffness of early cancer. This technology, phonon endoscopy, is hair-thin so can piggy-back along most pre-existing medical instruments (e.g. endoscopes, needles) and procedures. In the future this technology can help clinicians: pre-screen suspicious tissue for a biopsy rather than indiscriminately excising potentially non-cancerous tissue, identify tumour margins for excision, identify viscoelastic markers in fluid biopsies, and much more!