
Lorena CussóFundación para la Investigación biomédica del Hospital Gregorio Marañón · Unidad de Medicina y Cirugía Experimental
Lorena Cussó
PhD
About
55
Publications
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Introduction
I received my PhD from UNED in 2014, and currently I am a researcher at FIBHGM. In broad terms, the aim of my research line is to contribute to the field of molecular imaging by taking advantage of different specificity enhancement strategies in order to address practical challenges in the molecular imaging workflow. From 2015 to 2021, I have participated in 13 national and 2 international projects, and I have authored 18 scientific articles in ISI journals.
Additional affiliations
Education
October 2013 - October 2014
September 2008 - June 2010
September 2002 - September 2008
Publications
Publications (55)
Infective endocarditis (IE) represents a significant concern among hospital-acquired infections, frequently caused by the Gram-positive bacterium Staphylococcus aureus. Nuclear imaging is emerging as a noninvasive and precise diagnostic tool. However, the gold standard radiotracer [¹⁸F]-FDG cannot distinguish between infection and inflammation, res...
The use of flow cytometry in mice is constrained by several factors, including the limited availability of mouse-specific antibodies and the need to work with small volumes of peripheral blood. This is particularly challenging for longitudinal studies, as serial blood samples should not exceed 10% of the total blood volume in mice. To address this,...
Vulvovaginal candidiasis (VVC) is characterized as a very common fungal infection that significantly affects women’s health worldwide. Essential oils (EOs) are currently being evaluated as an alternative therapy. The development of efficient techniques such as micro- or nanoencapsulation for protecting and controlling release is essential to overco...
Purpose. The Gram-positive Staphylococcus aureus bacterium is one of the leading causes of infection in humans. The lack of specific noninvasive techniques for diagnosis of staphylococcal infection together with the severity of its associated complications support the need for new specific and selective diagnostic tools. This work presents the succ...
Myosin inhibitor mavacamten is the only targeted treatment available for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a disease caused by hundreds of genetic variants that affect mainly sarcomeric myosin and its negative regulator cardiac myosin-binding protein C (cMyBP-C, encoded by MYBPC3). Here, we have examined whether the reported limited efficacy of ma...
Traditional approaches to solid rectal therapies have halted progress, leading to a continual decline in the use of conventional suppositories. Additive manufacturing techniques have been recently explored as a suitable innovative tool for suppository fabrication. However, little advancement has been made in composition materials for 3D-printed sup...
Osteomyelitis is an infection of the bone, associated with an inflammatory process. Imaging plays an important role in establishing the diagnosis and the most appropriate patient management. However, data are lacking regarding the use of preclinical molecular imaging techniques to assess osteomyelitis progression in experimental models. This study...
Imaging using radiolabelled monoclonal antibodies can provide, non-invasively, molecular information which allows for the planning of the best treatment and for monitoring the therapeutic response in cancer, as well as in chronic inflammatory diseases. In the present study, our main goal was to evaluate if a pre-therapy scan with radiolabelled anti...
Background and Purpose
Reperfusion therapy is the standard of care for ischaemic stroke; however, there is a need to identify new therapeutic targets able to ameliorate cerebral damage. Neutrophil β1 adrenoceptors (β1AR) have been linked to neutrophil migration during exacerbated inflammation. Given the central role of neutrophils in cerebral damag...
Background
Small extracellular vesicles (sEVs) are emerging natural nanoplatforms in cancer diagnosis and therapy, through the incorporation of signal components or drugs in their structure. However, for their translation into the clinical field, there is still a lack of tools that enable a deeper understanding of their in vivo pharmacokinetics or...
We report a medium-throughput drug-screening platform (METPlatform) based on organotypic cultures that allows to evaluate inhibitors against metastases growing in situ. By applying this approach to the unmet clinical need of brain metastasis, we identified several vulnerabilities. Among them, a blood-brain barrier permeable HSP90 inhibitor showed h...
Stimuli-responsive nanomaterials are very attractive for biomedical applications. They can be activated through external stimuli or by the physico-chemical conditions present in cells or tissues. Here, we describe the preparation of hybrid iron oxide-manganese oxide core-satellite shell nanostructures that change their contrast mode in magnetic res...
Stem-cell-derived extracellular vesicles (EVs) have demonstrated multiple beneficial effects in preclinical models of cardiac diseases. However, poor retention at the target site may limit their therapeutic efficacy. Cardiac extracellular matrix hydrogels (cECMH) seem promising as drug-delivery materials and could improve the retention of EVs, but...
Deliberate and local increase of the temperature within solid tumors represents an effective therapeutic approach. Thermal therapies embrace this concept leveraging the capability of some species to convert the absorbed energy into heat. To that end, magnetic hyperthermia (MHT) uses magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) that can effectively dissipate the e...
In both clinical and preclinical scenarios, 2-deoxy-2[18F]fluoro-D-glucose ([18F]FDG) is the radiotracer most widely used to study brain glucose metabolism with positron emission tomography (PET). In clinical practice, there is a worldwide standardized protocol for preparing patients for [18F]FDG-PET studies, which specifies the room lighting. Howe...
Mutations in the EPM2A and EPM2B genes, encoding laforin and malin proteins respectively, are responsible for Lafora disease, a fatal form of progressive myoclonus epilepsy with autosomal recessive inheritance. Neuroimaging studies of patients with Lafora disease have shown different degrees of brain atrophy, decreased glucose brain uptake and alte...
Exclusion of brain metastases from clinical trials is a major cause of the limited therapeutic options for this growing population of cancer patients. Here, we report a medium-throughput drug-screening platform (METPlatform) based on organotypic cultures that allows to evaluate inhibitors against metastases growing in situ . By applying this approa...
Cardiomyocytes are subjected to the intense mechanical stress and metabolic demands of the beating heart. It is unclear whether these cells, which are long-lived and rarely renew, manage to preserve homeostasis on their own. While analyzing macrophages lodged within the healthy myocardium, we discovered that they actively took up material, includin...
The morphological changes that occur in the central nervous system of patients with severe acute intermittent porphyria (AIP) have not yet been clearly established. The aim of this work was to analyse brain involvement in patients with severe AIP without epileptic seizures or clinical posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome, as well as in a mo...
Inflammaging? Blame T cells!
Mitochondrial dysfunction in various tissues is a prominent characteristic of age-related deterioration, but it is unclear how mitochondrial dysfunction in particular cell types contributes to this process. Desdín-Micó et al. generated mice with T cells that were specifically deficient in a mitochondrial DNA–stabilizing...
Nonrevascularizable coronary artery disease is a frequent cause of hibernating myocardium leading to heart failure (HF). Currently, there is a paucity of therapeutic options for patients with this condition. There is a lack of animal models resembling clinical features of hibernating myocardium. Here we present a large animal model of hibernating m...
Background
Extensive coronary artery disease without revascularization options results in ischemic hibernated myocardium and ultimately heart failure (HF). A metabolic reprogramming of the heart characterized by a shift from fatty acids (FFA) to glucose as the preferential metabolic substrate is frequent in HF and hibernated myocardium. Previous st...
Purpose
Existing clinical or microbiological scores are not sensitive enough to obtain prompt identification of patients at risk of complicated Clostridium difficile infection (CDI). Our aim was to use a CDI animal model to evaluate 2-deoxy-2-[¹⁸F]fluoro-D-glucose positron emission tomography ([¹⁸F]FDG-PET) as a marker of severe course of infection...
The front cover artwork is provided by Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, the Jožef Stefan Institute Ljubljana, Slovenia, and the university hospitals Gregorio Marañon and La Princesa in Madrid, Spain. The image shows an occlusion in an artery which is marked by bimodal nanoparticles and detected by optical coherence tomography, while being exp...
The Front Cover shows an occlusion in an artery which is marked by bimodal nanoparticles and detected by optical coherence tomography, while being exposed to a magnetic field, thereby improving the signal. More information can be found in the Article by J. Hu et al.
Background
The Platform for Innovation in Medical and Health Technologies (ITEMAS) is a network of 66 healthcare centres focused on fostering innovation in medical and health technologies as an essential tool for increasing the sustainability of the Spanish healthcare system. The present research is focused on defining a formal representation that...
Improving clinical techniques for cardiovascular imaging is important for better diagnosis / treatment of cardiovascular diseases, a main cause of mortality in western countries. One problem is a lack of contrast and hence the difficult interpretation of intracoronary images, especially those achieved by optical techniques, such as intracoronary op...
Vascular stiffness is a major cause of cardiovascular disease during normal aging and in Hutchinson–Gilford progeria syndrome (HGPS), a rare genetic disorder caused by ubiquitous progerin expression. This mutant form of lamin A causes premature aging associated with cardiovascular alterations that lead to death at an average age of 14.6 years. We i...
Introduction
Retention of 2-deoxy-2-[¹⁸F]fluoro-D-glucose ¹⁸F-FDG in the bladder causes more problems in small animal research than in human research owing to the smaller size of the subject. Catheterization has been proposed to reduce bladder spillover both in human studies and in small animal research. Noninvasive alternatives such as hydration p...
Urination effects of hydration and furosemide.
(a) Minute 0 was chosen as reference coinciding with the furosemide administration in treated groups. Every animal received two subcutaneous (SC) saline boluses at minutes -20, and 0. *Treated groups (LD and HD) additionally received an intraperitoneal (IP) bolus of furosemide (0-time, total volume of...
In cases where catheter-related candidemia (CRC) must be managed without catheter withdrawal, antifungal lock therapy using highly active anti-biofilm (HAAB) agents is combined with systemic treatment. However, the activity of HAAB agents has never been studied in in vivo models using bioluminescence. We assessed the efficacy of micafungin using a...
Purpose:
Myocardial uptake can hamper visualization of lung tumors, atherosclerotic plaques, and inflammatory diseases in 2-deoxy-2-[18F]fluoro-D-glucose ([18F]FDG) studies because it leads to spillover in adjacent structures. Several preparatory pre-imaging protocols (including dietary restrictions and drugs) have been proposed to decrease physio...
Early diagnosis in Alzheimer's disease (AD), prior to the appearance of marked clinical symptoms, is critical to prevent irreversible neuronal damage and neural malfunction that leads to dementia and death. Therefore, there is an urgent need to generate new contrast agents which reveal by a non-invasive method the presence of some of the pathologic...
The stromal microenvironment controls response to injury and inflammation, and is also an important determinant of cancer cell behavior. However, our understanding of its modulation by miRNA (miR) and their respective targets is still sparse. Here, we identified the miR-25-93-106b cluster and two new target genes as critical drivers for metastasis...
The cardiac gating signal (CGS) in positron emission tomography (PET) studies is usually obtained from an electrocardiography (ECG) monitor. In this work, we propose a method to obtain the CGS in small-animal PET using the acquired list-mode data without using any hardware or end-user input.
The CGS was obtained from the number of coincidences over...
Significance
Noonan syndrome (NS) is a developmental disorder caused by germ-line mutations in various components of the RAS signaling pathway. The pathophysiological mechanisms underlying the clinical manifestations in NS patients and the basis for the observed phenotypic variability are poorly understood. To date, mouse models carrying mutations...
Purpose
Besides its application in oncology, 18F-FDG PET-CT imaging is also useful in the diagnosis of certain lung infections, inflammatory diseases, and atherosclerotic plaques. Myocardial uptake of 18F-FDG may hamper visualization of the lesions caused by these diseases. Two approaches have been proposed for reducing myocardial uptake in preclin...
Homing is an inherent, complex, multistep process performed by cells such as human bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) to travel from a distant location to inflamed or damaged tissue and tumors. This ability of hMSCs has been exploited as a tumor-targeting strategy in cell-based cancer therapy. The purpose of this study was to investigate th...
Self-gated cine sequences are a common choice for cardiac MRI in preclinical applications. The aims of our work were to apply the compressed sensing technique to IntraGateFLASH cardiac MRI studies on rats and to find the maximum acceleration factor achievable with this technique.
Our reconstruction method extended the Split Bregman formulation to m...
Single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) offers the possibility to study the biodistribution of 111In-labeled human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs). This functional information can be complemented by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that provides the anatomical context to the SPECT image. However, acquiring such studies with separate SPECT...
Reporter gene (RG) imaging of cell-based therapies provides a direct readout of therapeutic efficacy by assessing the fate of implanted cells. To permit long-term cellular imaging, RGs are traditionally required to be integrated into the cellular genome. This poses a potential safety risk and regulatory bottleneck for clinical translation as integr...
Proliferation of S/MAR MC labeled cells can be monitored over time in living subjects. S/MAR MC labeled breast cancer cells were implanted into the right flank of Nu/Nu mice and bioluminescence imaging (BLI) was performed over time. As tumors developed more luminescent signal was noted.
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Single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) offers the possibility to study the biodistribution of 111In-labeled human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs). This functional information can be complemented by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that provides the anatomical context to the SPECT image. However, acquiring such studies with separate SPECT...
Tumor-homing is a complex, multistep process used by many cells, like mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), to travel from a distant location to a tumor. The purpose of this study is to investigate the applicability of 111In-oxine for tracking human MSCs in vivo with single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)....
Quantitative analysis of dynamic cardiac PET studies provides useful diagnostic information regarding different heart diseases. To correctly perform the kinetic analysis, tracer time-activity curves (TAC) must be precisely extracted from the chosen tissue on the imaging data. In this work we present an alternative clustering algorithm for segmentat...