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11 April 2024

Physicist Johannes F. de Boer, professor of Biophotonics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Department of Physics and Astronomy, has been awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). In this five-year research program 'Immuno-OCT', he will develop a new optical endoscopic imaging technique to detect cancer in the human body with a resolution 10 to 100 times higher than currently possible. The major challenge is to develop very small motorized catheters that can penetrate deep into the body to determine both the structure and the molecular composition of tissue with light.

Advantages of optical techniques
Commonly used techniques in hospitals to image the body for disease detection are PET and CT scans. These techniques can image the entire body but have limited resolution: in the early stages, tumors are too small to be visible with PET and CT. Optical techniques have a much higher resolution and can detect tumors at a much earlier stage. Since light does not penetrate deeply into tissue, small motorized catheters are being developed for the esophagus and lungs to visualize the body from within. At the same time, antibodies are injected with a fluorescent 'tag'. These antibodies bind to signaling proteins or cell surface receptors, and the tag lights up when illuminated with a laser.

Illuminating tags
Now, the structure of the tissue can be imaged via the small catheter using Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), and simultaneously, when the tissue is illuminated with a laser, the antibodies with a tag light up. The unique aspect of the optical technique is that multiple antibodies with tags of different colors can be used. This allows for the detailed three-dimensional visualization of the interaction of different cell surface receptors and signaling proteins. This is not possible with PET, and furthermore, PET has the disadvantage of using a radioactive tag.

De Boer expects that this new technique can not only be of great importance for the earlier detection and diagnosis of diseases but also accelerate research into new medications because on a microscopic level it can be visualized whether new medications are reaching the right place in the human body. He collaborates with lung specialists from Amsterdam UMC, and gastroenterologists from UMCG Groningen.

Bio
Johannes de Boer is a professor at VU Amsterdam and head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and part-time affiliated with ARCNL. His research field is the development of new optical imaging techniques for medicine. Additionally, these techniques are also used for the chip machines of ASML. It is particularly noteworthy that VU Amsterdam has secured a total of five ERC AvG grants, two of which are for the Department of Physics and Astronomy.