Seeing The Light

BIOPHOTONICS:On the screen, a giant and glowing alien blob wraps itself around its hapless prey, engulfing it and dumping it into a lethal acid bath before silently moving on to the next victim.

But before you grab the popcorn and settle in, this is no cult sci-fi/killer movie. Instead, this is footage from a scientific talk.

Prof Sergio Grinstein has come to Dublin from the University of Toronto to showcase how high-end microscopy can zone in as a cell from the immune system trashes a foreign particle, just as it would dispose of an invading bug in the body.

The reason for screening the molecular gorefest? It’s to highlight what can be achieved through “biophotonics”, an approach that uses light-based technology in non-invasive biomedical research and applications.

Using molecular probes and sophisticated microscopy and imaging, it’s now possible to monitor molecules in real time as the macrophages “eat” their prey, says Grinstein, who was in Dublin recently to launch a new national biophotonics platform in Ireland.

“I think the area is exploding, and it is becoming important in diagnosis, not just in basic research. It’s non-invasive, it is extremely informative, and it’s very fast,” he says. “The technology has really developed in the last few years with new modalities of imaging for organisms. Many of these technologies are still in the experimental stage, but some are becoming commercially available.”

In his lab, Grinstein combines the biochemistry of making fluorescently-labelled probes that stick to individual fats and proteins with the wizardry of confocal microscopy, which can image living processes in real time.

The resulting movies allow him to track individual particles and molecules as they join the dance between the immune system and invader. He’s looking for deeper insight into how the recognition and engulfment processes work, and particularly how wily bacteria can sometimes evade or hijack the immune system. “If you don’t know the mechanism you won’t know how to treat them,” he says.

The biophotonics approach requires a meld of biology, chemistry, physics and computing and he sees the need for a culture change to support this kind of convergence, particularly by those who hold the purse strings.

“I hope the administrators of science get a better appreciation of this because the tendency has been for individual entrepreneurs to be given 600 sq feet and being told go get a Nobel Prize and go do it on your own. But I think the complexity means now the cost of doing research is such that individual scientists can no longer survive,” he says.

The newly-launched National Biophotonics and Imaging Platform Ireland initiative pulls together researchers under a single umbrella that catches much in its shade, including not only microscopy and imaging but also medical diagnostics like MRI and ultra-sensitive testing for biomarkers of disease.

“These are really high-end, advanced technologies and they are not standing still,” says Brian Harvey, professor of molecular medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, where the launch took place.

“The idea of setting up the platform was to harness the investment that has been put in to biophotonics and imaging in Ireland both in equipment and people,” explains Harvey, national co-ordinator of NBIPI.

Funded to the tune of €30 million over four years by the Higher Education Authority, the platform brings together Trinity, DCU, UCC, NUI Maynooth, UL, NUI Galway, Institutes of Technology in Dublin and Dundalk and European partners in Scandinavia and Italy. The goal is to train up 155 new researchers as well as facilitating sharing of equipment and expertise. Industrial links are also key, according to Prof Harvey. “One of the missions of the platform is to aid in the development of new technologies, both hardware and software and develop close links to industries, particularly multinationals involved in advanced RD,” he says. it’s about collaborating on wider platforms to get a better handle on disease.

But what kind of an impact can biophotonics have on medicine? The changes are coming through in areas like cancer and neurodegeneration, according to Harvey. “It has had probably its highest impact in those areas because the technologies are often non-invasive. The surgeon doesn’t have to go in and probe to find the lesion or whether the blood flow is going correctly through a particular tissue, all these can be monitored remotely now,” he says.