The Center for Biophotonic Sensors and Systems (CBSS) www.bu.edu/cbss is achieving breakthroughs in medicine. Today, engineers and scientists are working with industry to realize the potential of light waves to diagnose and treat diseases.
CBSS is a joint venture of Boston University www.bu.edu and the University of California at Davis http://ucsd.edu. Support for $391,927 from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRC) www.nsf.gov/eng/iip/iucrc, is enabling the development of optical microscopes to use to image deep into biological tissue.
In the future, collaborative research is expected to lead to significant commercial benefits in disease diagnosis, drug efficacy testing, and patient drug effectiveness monitoring. Imagine having the ability to manipulate light waves to see through a skull right into the brain or to use lasers to diagnose a bacterial infection in a matter of minutes.
Researchers are working on various projects to develop a method to tag and fingerprint viruses such as Ebola using a tag that responds to a certain wavelength of light. Another research team is working with a company called BioTools www.btools.com to develop a test that uses lasers to diagnose a bacterial infection accurately.
Another research team is attaching light sensitive proteins from algae to neurons in the brain to observe and even control certain brain activity with the hope of better understanding Parkinson’s disease.