Moderated by: Carl G. Simon, Jr., Ph.D., National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
About the Speaker: Dr. Kotecha is a founding member and CEO of O2M technologies. She graduated from the Physics program from Jabalpur University, India in solid state NMR of quadrupolar nuclei in 2001. During her academic career before O2M, she has worked as a full-time tenured professor of Physics at Government Science College, Jabalpur; as a visiting scientist at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, at Weizmann Institute of Science, University of Duisburg-Essen, and University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2017, she co-founded O2M Technologies to bring the EPR oxygen imaging technology to the market. Dr. Kotecha is an expert in magnetic resonance methodology, instrumentation, pulse sequence design, and applications of MRS/MRI to biomaterials, engineered tissues, nanoparticles, membrane proteins, cryolites, ferroelectrics, and cancer. She is an author of more than 40 publication and the lead editor of 2017 Wiley book “Magnetic Resonance in Tissue Engineering”. She developed an ASTM International standard F3224-17 “Standard Test Method for Evaluating Growth of Engineered Cartilage Tissue using Magnetic Resonance Imaging” that received CDRH recognition in 2019.
About the Webinar: The lack of oxygen supply to the highly metabolic pancreatic islet cells is one of the major factors contributing to the failure of islet transplantation devices targeting the cure of type I diabetes (T1D). The loss of islets due to hypoxia is common in almost all modes of islet transplantation- micro-encapsulation devices, macro-encapsulation devices, and tissue-grafts transplantation. Several approaches to improve oxygenation in these transplantation devices are thus being tested. However, because of the lack of available technologies to provide oxygen partial pressure (pO2) assessment in and around devices, the progress is severely hindered.
O2M Technologies’ platform non-invasive Oxygen Imaging technology has the potential to guide the development of islet cell transplantation therapies by providing real-time high accuracy pre- and post-implantation pO2 maps in and around devices in vitro and in vivo. O2M’s preclinical small animal oxygen imager, JIVA-25, provides average pO2 values in sample volumes (up to 40 mm) as well as three-dimensional pO2 maps with high spatial (0.5 mm, isotropic), temporal (1-10 min), and pO2 (1-3 torr) resolution. For reporting oxygen concentration, JIVA-25 uses oxygen-dependent relaxation rates of trityl radicals OX063 or its deuterated version OX071. This work is the outcome of JDRF-supported “Oxygen Measurement Core” facility established at O2M Technologies in 2019. We performed in vitro and in vivo pO2 measurements of acellular and cell loaded islet cell transplantation devices. These devices vary in shape, size, biomaterials, and oxygen profile. I will present the key data from these measurements in my webinar.