Unlocking the Secrets of Cancer Cells: Advanced Microscopy at OHSU with TMC Vibration Control

OHSU, it's, Oregon Health and Science University. It's an academic institution and also a big hospital that serves the Oregon community. At the same time, it has a big research component in the basic science and also in the translational field. Both the local OHSU multiscale microscopy core and the Pacific Northwest cryo EM center share the same facility in the basement of the Robertson Life Science Building at OHSU. Access to those facilities is different, while the local facility is, fee for service. The NIH center is at no cost for those all those users having approved projects. As a staff scientist, I assist a lot of the projects as part of the Knight Cancer Institute in looking at the nanobiology of cancer. There's a big push to look at how cancer cells are organized with their opportunities with the technologies that we have, is to be able to see with few nanometer resolution the features, that make up these, cells and tissues. Challenge here, of course, is to make these measurements using, technologies that run over periods of days to generate the dataset. Having all these microscopes in a good environment is essential. These instruments are very sensitive to vibration, to noise, and to electromagnetic interference. Environmental noise has affected our data, especially in this building. We are surrounded by the light rail, the river, the street car. That all affects our imaging. All of our electron microscopes are installed over TMC tables, and that has proven to be essential to be able to operate these instruments at their highest performance possible. OHSU deployed the STASIS Active Piezo Electric Cancellation System, which contains sensors inside which monitor the state of the system. And through active feedback control, they operate piezoelectric actuators, which expand and contract essentially equally and opposite to the vibration that's sensed. TMC has helped us mitigate all the vibrations that we have in this facility. On the TMC tables, we are at zero vibrations, which is essential for especially the high end instruments that we have in the facility. TMC's vibration control has allowed us to image at the highest resolution, including the nanoscale, and And without that, we'd have skewed data. We have finally gotten to the point in measurement science, that we are able to define the components in the organizations of cells and tissues. And I think it's going to give us a lot of insight as to how the components work together to actually produce the functions that we observe, in the, cells and tissues that we look at in the light microscope. So it's an exciting time, lots to learn, a lot of challenges in terms of interpreting the data, with the measurement tools are there, and I think it's going to be under what CHOPPA field evolves. Cancer affects everyone. Everyone knows someone who's had it or has it, and to be able to stop that for both the patient and for their loved ones would be life changing. What makes me proud about being at TMC and partnering with organizations like OHSU is that we get to be a small part of the groundbreaking research that's being performed by Claudia and her colleagues that really has a potential to make an impact on a larger scale.