Research overview

We are a multidisciplinary research team. The central theme of our studies focuses on improving personalized healthcare through molecular imaging approaches.

In summary, we discover, validate and translate molecular imaging biomarkers that can noninvasively assess disease load at early stages and/or evaluate early response to therapeutic regimens. We employ an interplay of methods and ideas spanning through chemistry, biochemistry, and molecular biology along with tomography imaging to realize the ideas.

Molecular imaging methods that we mainly focus on are Photoacoustic and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) as well as Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) and the biomarkers that we are interested in evaluating are physiological changes in the tumor microenvironment, such as pH, hypoxia, vasculature and enzyme activity.

We use preclinical rodent models to validate and translate our imaging probes and methods within an in vivo setting, with the ultimate goal of clinical translation.

OCT 2025: Arjun attended the Global Scientific Conference organised by the American Chemical Society (ACS) and IIT-Bombay and presented a flash talk
OCT 2025: Sanhita presented the lab's work in an invited talk at the Centre for Nanoscience Engineering (CeNSE) at the Indian Institute of Science
JUN 2025: Sanhita, Pooja and Roshni attended the Asia-Pacific NMR conference (AP-NMR) held in Pune. Sanhita and Roshni gave oral talks, and Pooja presented a poster detailing her work.
Pooja published her first research article (and the first independent article from the group) in JACS Au (2025)
Pooja attended and presented her work at the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, ISMRM 2025, in Honolulu, Hawaii (2025)
Sanhita joined the Editorial board of Molecular Imaging and Biology (Springer Nature) as Senior Editor (2024)
Sanhita received the Har Gobind Khorana Innovative Young Investigator Award fellowship from the Department of Biotechnology, DBT, India (2024)
Ananya received a Travel Award to present at the WMIC 2024 in Montreal, Canada. Sanhita and Ananya attended WMIC 2024.
Sanhita received the MoE-STARS grant, which will focus on photoacoustic contrast agents for the targeted diagnosis of triple-negative breast cancer metastases (2023)