Rebekah Drezek

About

Rebekah Drezek is a Professor of Bioengineering and Associate Chair of Bioengineering at Rice University. Her research develops optical molecular imaging technologies for the in vivo assessment of tissue pathology and the quantitative analysis of nanoparticle uptake and interaction within cellular environments. Her work emphasizes the design, prototyping, and clinical testing of optical tools and nanomaterials that detect, diagnose, and treat cancer. She has translated nanoscale tools such as gold nanoparticles and quantum dot probes for targeted molecular imaging and tumor margin assessment, and developed photothermal nanoparticles aimed at targeting and eliminating cancer. Drezek collaborates on NIH-funded projects investigating gold nanoparticle-based delivery of cancer vaccines and adjuvants, and has served as principal investigator on projects developing high-resolution optical imaging approaches and nanoengineered imaging agents for breast cancer applications. Her research is interdisciplinary, involving collaborations with clinicians, molecular biologists, and biochemists within Rice and the Texas Medical Center, with a focus on leveraging emerging photonics technologies for minimally invasive, real-time disease detection and diagnosis. Drezek has published extensively, holds four patents, and has received numerous awards including the MIT Top Young Innovators Award, the AAMI Career Achievement Award, the Beckman Young Investigator Award, and the Adolph Lomb Medal…

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Mathematics
• Biology
• Computational biology
• Statistics
• Materials science
• Cancer research
• Genetics
• Algorithm
• Bioinformatics

Selected publications

• Metallic nanoparticles for cancer immunotherapy

  Materials Today · 2017-12-14 · 235 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Cancer immunotherapy, or the utilization of the body's immune system to attack tumor cells, has gained prominence over the past few decades as a viable cancer treatment strategy. Recently approved immunotherapeutics have conferred remission upon patients with previously bleak outcomes and have expanded the number of tools available to treat cancer. Nanoparticles -including polymeric, liposomal, and metallic formulations - naturally traffic to the spleen and lymph organs and the relevant immune c…

  PublisherDOI

• A mechanistic investigation exploring the differential transfection efficiencies between the easy-to-transfect SK-BR3 and difficult-to-transfect CT26 cell lines

  Journal of Nanobiotechnology · 2017-05-02 · 24 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  BACKGROUND: Gold-polyamidoamine (AuPAMAM) has previously been shown to successfully transfect cells with high efficiency. However, we have observed that certain cell types are more amenable to Au-PAMAM transfection than others. Here we utilized two representative cell lines-a "difficult to transfect" CT26 cell line and an "easy to transfect" SK-BR3 cell line-and attempted to determine the underlying mechanism for differential transfection in both cell types. Using a commonly established poly-cat…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Universal microbial diagnostics using random DNA probes

  Science Advances · 2016-09-02 · 18 citations

  articleOpen access

  Early identification of pathogens is essential for limiting development of therapy-resistant pathogens and mitigating infectious disease outbreaks. Most bacterial detection schemes use target-specific probes to differentiate pathogen species, creating time and cost inefficiencies in identifying newly discovered organisms. We present a novel universal microbial diagnostics (UMD) platform to screen for microbial organisms in an infectious sample, using a small number of random DNA probes that are…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Changes in Optical Properties of Plasmonic Nanoparticles in Cellular Environments are Modulated by Nanoparticle PEGylation and Serum Conditions

  Nanoscale Research Letters · 2016-06-18 · 10 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  When plasmonic nanoparticles (NPs) are internalized by cells and agglomerate within intracellular vesicles, their optical spectra can shift and broaden as a result of plasmonic coupling of NPs in close proximity to one another. For such optical changes to be accounted for in the design of plasmonic NPs for light-based biomedical applications, quantitative design relationships between designable factors and spectral shifts need to be established. Here we begin building such a framework by investi…

  PublisherDOI

• Extreme Compressed Sensing of Poisson Rates From Multiple Measurements

  IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing · 2022 · 5 citations

  Compressed sensing (CS) is a signal processing technique that enables the efficient recovery of a sparse high-dimensional signal from low-dimensional measurements. In the multiple measurement vector (MMV) framework, a set of signals with the same support must be recovered from their corresponding measurements. Here, we present the first exploration of the MMV problem where signals are independently drawn from a sparse, multivariate Poisson distribution. We are primarily motivated by a suite of b…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant T32EB009379

  NIH · $1.6M · 2015

• Nonspecific DNA Sensors for Scalable Pathogen Diagnostics

  NSF · $260k · 2020–2023

• NIH Grant RC2GM092599

  NIH · $3.0M · 2012

Frequent coauthors

• Jennifer L. West

  Duke University

  27 shared

• Emmanuel Chang

  Tennessee Retina

  27 shared

• Rebecca Richards‐Kortum

  Rice University

  25 shared

• Naomi J. Halas

  Rice University

  23 shared

• Aaron E. Foster

  Medpace (United States)

  21 shared

• Ming‐Qiang Zhu

  Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics

  21 shared

• Anant Agrawal

  United States Food and Drug Administration

  19 shared

• Lissett R. Bickford

  Children's Cancer Therapy Development Institute

  17 shared

Labs

• Drezek LabPI

Awards & honors

• MIT TR100 Technology Reviews’ selection of 100 Top Young Inn…
• Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (…
• Beckman Young Investigator Award (2005)
• U.S. Department of Defense Era of Hope Scholar (2007)
• American Society for Photobiology Research Award (2008)

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• Gang Baoh-114