Scholars@Duke
Megan Madonna

Megan Madonna

Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
megan.madonna@duke.edu
140 Science Dr., Gross Hall 379, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

Multi-probe Metabolic Fluorescence Microscopy Captures Poor Tumor Immunogenicity

Conference Optical Molecular Probes Imaging and Drug Delivery Omp 2025 in Proceedings Optica Biophotonics Congress 2025 Part of Optica Biophotonics Congress Optics in the Life Sciences · January 1, 2025 Visualizing complex tumor-immune metabolic interactions is imperative to understanding cancer progression. Cocultures of 4T1 tumor cells and CD8+ T cells were imaged for glucose uptake and mitochondrial metabolism. Results point to poor immunogenic tumor p ... Full text Cite

Optical imaging reveals chemotherapy-induced metabolic reprogramming of residual disease and recurrence.

Journal Article Sci Adv · April 5, 2024 Fewer than 20% of triple-negative breast cancer patients experience long-term responses to mainstay chemotherapy. Resistant tumor subpopulations use alternative metabolic pathways to escape therapy, survive, and eventually recur. Here, we show in vivo, lon ... Full text Link to item Cite

Development of a multi-scale imaging tool to quantify in vivo metabolic heterogeneity

Conference Progress in Biomedical Optics and Imaging Proceedings of SPIE · January 1, 2024 We developed an approach to quantify intra-tumoral metabolic heterogeneity of in vivo tumor models by leveraging a computationally designed multi-scale microscope and a suite of exogenous fluorescent contrast agents to provide functional and structural inf ... Full text Cite

A Multiplexed Quantitative Spectroscopy Method to Measure Spectrally Overlapping Metabolic Fluorophores

Conference Novel Optical Materials and Applications Noma 2024 in Proceedings Advanced Photonics Congress 2024 Part of Optica Advanced Photonics Congress · January 1, 2024 We have developed and validated an in vivo quantitative spectroscopy method to measure spectrally overlapping fluorophores relevant to cancer metabolism using an inverse Monte Carlo algorithm and linear spectral unmixing. ... Cite

Metabolic Imaging as a Tool to Characterize Chemoresistance and Guide Therapy in Triple-Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC).

Journal Article Molecular cancer research : MCR · October 2023 After an initial response to chemotherapy, tumor relapse is frequent. This event is reflective of both the spatiotemporal heterogeneities of the tumor microenvironment as well as the evolutionary propensity of cancer cell populations to adapt to variable c ... Full text Cite

Community-Centered Design Thinking as a Scalable Stem Learning Intervention

Journal Article Advances in Engineering Education · January 1, 2023 Background: Through the human-centered design process (HCD), students, referred to as learners, can use a personal lens to contextualize engineering concepts and solve real-world problems (Goldman and Kabayadondo 2016). The Ignite program, created by the C ... Full text Open Access Cite

In Vivo Metabolic Imaging Reveals Mitochondrial Membrane Potential Reprogramming During Residual Disease Following Chemotherapy

Conference Optical Molecular Probes Imaging and Drug Delivery Omp 2023 · January 1, 2023 We performed intravital fluorescent microscopy in preclinical models of disease regression in Triple Negative Breast Cancer to compare dynamic, long-term in vivo changes across three major metabolic axes in chemotherapy-resistant and chemotherapy-sensitive ... Cite

Development of a multi-scale platform to quantify metabolic heterogeneity in vivo

Conference Optical Molecular Probes Imaging and Drug Delivery Omp 2023 · January 1, 2023 We developed an approach to quantify intratumoral metabolic heterogeneity of in vivo tumor models by leveraging a computationally designed multi-scale microscope and a suite of exogenous fluorescent contrast agents to provide functional and structural info ... Cite

In vivo metabolic imaging identifies lipid vulnerability in a preclinical model of Her2+/Neu breast cancer residual disease and recurrence.

Journal Article NPJ Breast Cancer · September 26, 2022 Recurrent cancer cells that evade therapy is a leading cause of death in breast cancer patients. This risk is high for women showing an overexpression of human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (Her2). Cells that persist can rely on different substrates f ... Full text Link to item Cite

A Spectroscopic Technique to Simultaneously Characterize Fatty Acid Uptake, Mitochondrial Activity, Vascularity, and Oxygen Saturation for Longitudinal Studies In Vivo.

Journal Article Metabolites · April 19, 2022 Aggressive breast cancer has been shown to shift its metabolism towards increased lipid catabolism as the primary carbon source for oxidative phosphorylation. In this study, we present a technique to longitudinally monitor lipid metabolism and oxidative ph ... Full text Link to item Cite

[18F]Fluoro-DCP, a first generation PET radiotracer for monitoring protein sulfenylation in vivo.

Journal Article Redox biology · February 2022 Redox metabolism plays essential functions in the pathology of cancer and many other diseases. While several radiotracers for imaging redox metabolism have been developed, there are no reports of radiotracers for in vivo imaging of protein oxidation. Here ... Full text Cite

In Vivo Optical Metabolic Imaging of Long-Chain Fatty Acid Uptake in Orthotopic Models of Triple-Negative Breast Cancer.

Journal Article Cancers (Basel) · January 5, 2021 Targeting a tumor's metabolic dependencies is a clinically actionable therapeutic approach; however, identifying subtypes of tumors likely to respond remains difficult. The use of lipids as a nutrient source is of particular importance, especially in breas ... Full text Link to item Cite

In vivo metabolic imaging reveals mitochondrial membrane potential reprogramming following Her2-targeted therapy and dormant disease

Conference Optics Infobase Conference Papers · January 1, 2020 We performed in intravital fluorescent microscopy in a preclinical cancer dormancy model to capture key changes in mitochondrial activity associated with Her2 treated breast cancer both acutely and in a residual disease state. ... Cite

In vivo optical metabolic imaging of long-chain fatty acid uptake in orthotopic models of triple negative breast cancer

Journal Article · 2020 Targeting a tumor’s metabolic dependencies is a clinically actionable therapeutic approach, but identifying subtypes of tumors likely to respond remains difficult. The use of lipids as a nutrient source is of particular importance, especially in breast can ... Full text Cite

Optical Imaging of Glucose Uptake and Mitochondrial Membrane Potential to Characterize Her2 Breast Tumor Metabolic Phenotypes.

Journal Article Molecular cancer research : MCR · July 2019 With the large number of women diagnosed and treated for breast cancer each year, the importance of studying recurrence has become evident due to most deaths from breast cancer resulting from tumor recurrence following therapy. To mitigate this, cellular a ... Full text Cite

Simultaneous in vivo optical quantification of key metabolic and vascular endpoints reveals tumor metabolic diversity in murine breast tumor models.

Journal Article J Biophotonics · April 2019 Therapeutically exploiting vascular and metabolic endpoints becomes critical to translational cancer studies because altered vascularity and deregulated metabolism are two important cancer hallmarks. The metabolic and vascular phenotypes of three sibling b ... Full text Link to item Cite

Drug-Free ROS Sponge Polymeric Microspheres Reduce Tissue Damage from Ischemic and Mechanical Injury.

Journal Article ACS biomaterials science & engineering · April 2018 The inherent antioxidant function of poly(propylene sulfide) (PPS) microspheres (MS) was dissected for different reactive oxygen species (ROS), and therapeutic benefits of PPS-MS were explored in models of diabetic peripheral arterial disease (PAD) and mec ... Full text Cite

Development of enhanced ethanol ablation as an alternative to surgery in treatment of superficial solid tumors.

Journal Article Sci Rep · August 18, 2017 While surgery is at the foundation of cancer treatment, its access is limited in low-income countries. Here, we describe development of a low-cost alternative therapy based on intratumoral ethanol injection suitable for resource-limited settings. Although ... Full text Link to item Cite

Automation of antimicrobial activity screening.

Journal Article AMB Express · March 2016 Manual and automated methods were compared for routine screening of compounds for antimicrobial activity. Automation generally accelerated assays and required less user intervention while producing comparable results. Automated protocols were validated for ... Full text Cite

Integrated dual-modal microscope for imaging of key metabolic and vascular endpoints in preclinical cancer models

Conference Optics Infobase Conference Papers · January 1, 2016 We have developed and utilized a wide field, high resolution microscope to capture multiple key metabolic and vascular endpoints to different indolent from metastatic disease. ... Full text Cite

Longitudinal study of arteriogenesis with swept source optical coherence tomography and hyperspectral imaging

Conference Progress in Biomedical Optics and Imaging Proceedings of SPIE · January 1, 2013 Peripheral arterial disease (PAD) is an atherosclerotic disease of the extremities that leads to high rates of myocardial infarction and stroke, increased mortality, and reduced quality of life. PAD is especially prevalent in diabetic patients, and is comm ... Full text Cite