Research interests

My main research focus was to understand the pharmacokinetic properties of radiotracers to accelerate and improve drug development in neuroscience, and cancer from bench-to-bed with focus on the Blood Brain Barrier (BBB).

With this background, my current work encompasses whole body tracer imaging with special focus on organ axes between lymphoid organs and disease location under chronic mental stress. Hence, we have established different mouse stress models to investigate how chronic stress contributes to poor immune surveillance, patient outcome, prognosis and the effect on immunotherapy response. Within the next three Years, I will investigate in an international consortium (EPILUCAFS) epigenetic drivers of cancer-associated fibroblasts in chronic stress and immunosuppression in lung cancer. Currently, I am performing image-based metabolic phenotyping of KRAS driven lung cancer mouse models using positron emission tomography (PET). To overcome poor spatial resolution of PET, we have established a radioactive cell sorting technique (radioFlow) with the aim of understanding immune cell metabolism and metabolite competition within the tumour microenvironment and lymphoid organs in cancer. Using total body PET information, combined with molecular biology techniques, a further objective is to investigate new biomarkers and understand underlying mechanism of chronic stress disorders and different tissue microenvironments.

Techniques, methods & infrastructure

  • Radiolabeling (PET, SPECT, Therapeutics)
  • Drug development: in vitro techniques as lipophilicity, permeability, plasma protein binding, drug distribution and metabolism, cell culture (co-culture models and real-time kinetic assays), binding studies, autoradiography and ex vivo & in vitro metabolism and biodistribution studies.
  • In vivo radio-metabolite analysis and plasma protein binding for kinetic modeling and radiotracer development (human and animal studies)
  • Preclinical Imaging µPET/µCT
  • Metabolic Imaging
  • Cancer Imaging
  • Neuro Imaging
  • Imaging Organ-Axis/Organ-Crosstalk
  • Stress Mouse Models
  • RadioFlow
  • Molecular Biology Techniques (wetlab)

Grants

Chronic stress and immunosuppression in lung cancer: focus on epigenetic drivers in cancer-associated fibroblasts (EPILUCAFS) (2024) Source of Funding: EU, TRANSCAN-3 Principal Investigator

Contact Vraka Lab

Dr.rer.nat. Chrysoula Vraka, MSc Principal Investigator (PI) & Postdoctoral Researcher (senior postdoc)

Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-guided Therapy (Clinical Division of Nuclear Medicine) Position: Research Associate (Postdoc)

Medical University of Vienna (MUW) Medizinische Universität Wien Spitalgasse 23 1090 Wien, Österreich

T: +43 1 40400 58720