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

Scholarly Works - Journal articles

In vivo imaging of metabolic heterogeneity across three endpoints relevant to aggressive breast cancer.

Journal article PNAS Nexus · March 2026 Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive subtype of breast cancer with poor prognosis and a high likelihood of recurrence. Residual disease after therapy is a key predictor of recurrence, often driven by intratumoral metabolic heterogeneity. A ... Full text Link to item Cite

Quantifying Spatiotemporal Heterogeneity of Tumor Metabolism and Vasculature with a Multiparametric Point-of-Investigation Microscope.

Journal article BME Front · 2025 Objective: The aim of this study was to develop and apply a dual-scale Capillary-Cell (CapCell) microscope to quantify spatial and temporal heterogeneity in tumor metabolism and vasculature during anti-angiogenic therapy. Impact Statement: This study intro ... Full text Link to item Cite

In vivo spectroscopy to concurrently characterize five metabolic and vascular endpoints relevant to aggressive breast cancer.

Journal article Biophotonics Discov · July 2024 SIGNIFICANCE: Emerging evidence that aggressive breast tumors rely on various substrates including lipids and glucose to proliferate and recur necessitates the development of tools to track multiple metabolic and vascular endpoints concurrently in vivo. AI ... Full text Link to item 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

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 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 Biol · 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 Link to item 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 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