Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Optical imaging tech transfer programs encourage collaboration

Transitioning technology from lab to market can be tricky. During a rump session organized by the Optoelectronics Industry Development Association (OIDA) at the Optical Society's (OSA) 2012 Biomedical Optics and 3D Imaging Congress, Robert Nordstrom of the National Institutes of Health said that better teamwork between academics and industry personnel can make a critical difference. He pointed to two funding programs offered by the National Cancer Institute (NCI)--the PAR-10-169 Academic-Industrial Partnerships for Translation of in vivo Imaging Systems for Cancer Investigations and the Network for Translational Research: Optical Imaging in Multimodal Platforms--that both require funding recipients to demonstrate academic/industrial collaboration.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Determining whether a patient will respond to chemo

I’m finding the plenary talks here at OSA’s Biomedical Optics and 3D Imaging conference particularly inspiring. For instance, this morning, Bruce Tromberg’s (University of California Irvine) talk on diffuse optical spectroscopy (DOS) as applied to breast cancer provided hope that cancer patients can be assessed before administration of chemotherapy to determine whether their tumors are likely to respond positively to the treatment (it turns out, you can predict this). Anybody who has watched a loved one suffer though this devastating treatment for naught will certainly appreciate this point.