Professor Qing-Bin Lu, from the University of Waterloos Faculty of Science, initiated a novel molecular-mechanism-based program to discover a new class of non-platinum-based-halogenated molecules that kill cancer cells, yet prevent healthy cells from being damaged. The most effective cancer drugs today may kill cancer cells, but they also kill healthy cells, causing severe side effects for patients in the process. Femtosecond time-resolved laser spectroscopy is a technique traditionally applied to study chemical reactions as they occur on a molecular level. The laser takes a series of rapid snapshots of molecules as they interact and change structure over time. The technique is part of a potential new field of science developed by Professor Lu called femtomedicine (FMD), which integrats the ultrafast laser with molecular biology and cell biology. Professor Lu has applied the tool to understand the molecular mechanisms that cause cancer at the very moment when the DNA becomes damaged. He has also used it to investigate how radiation therapy and chemotherapy using chemical agents, in particular the widely used platinum chemotherapeutic Cisplatin, work in treating a variety of cancers. We know DNA damage is the initial step, said Professor Lu. With the novel femtomedicine approach we can go back … Continue reading →

Home|News|Join Us|People|Projects|Publications|Talks|Courses The device has been developed by the MIT Media Labs Camera Culture group in collaboration with Bawendi Lab in the Department of Chemistry at MIT. A laser pulse that lasts less than one trillionth of a second is used as a flash and the light returning from the scene is collected by a camera at a rate equivalent to roughly half a trillion frames per second. However, due to very short exposure times (roughly two trillionth of a second) and a narrow field of view of the camera, the video is captured over several minutes by repeated and periodic sampling. The new technique, which we call Femto Photography, consists of femtosecond laser illumination, picosecond-accurate detectors and mathematical reconstruction techniques. Our light source is a Titanium Sapphire laser that emits pulses at regular intervals every ~13 nanoseconds. These pulses illuminate the scene, and also trigger our picosecond accurate streak tube which captures the light returned from the scene. The streak camera has a reasonable field of view in horizontal direction but very narrow (roughly equivalent to one scan line) in vertical dimension. At every recording, we can only record a '1D movie' of this narrow field of view. In … Continue reading →