I submitted this year to the 2020 Association of Medical Illustrator’s Salon.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fonc.2020.00739/full
Description
Fluorescent visualization of brain tumors is a recent advancement in safe glioma resection, but a lack of vascular permeability can prevent fluorescent markers from fully staining tumor tissue. Understanding the blood-brain barrier’s (BBB) structure is key to designing fluorescent labels and therapeutic drugs that can pass from the vasculature into brain tumor tissue. This scale illustration depicts the BBB environment, fluorescent markers, therapeutic methods, and drugs. The BBB environment with glycocalyx, basement membrane, pericytes, and astrocyte end-foot processes are in microns while the molecules in the right inset are in nanometers. The left inset is not to scale to enable comparison between the competent and disrupted tight-junction. By placing the drugs and fluorescent markers from the paper within the BBB structure, the illustration aims to help neurosurgical oncologists make decisions in designing more effective novel drugs and fluorescent visualization techniques.