EAGER: Selective Biodamage with Shaped THz Light Fields

Boston College, Chestnut Hill MA

Investigators

Abstract

To date, scientists have developed only a very small number of modalities to treat human disease: pharmaceutics, irradiation (photon and particle radiation, focused ultrasound), and surgery. Advances in each of these continues, as do efforts aimed at reducing side effects. Aside from efficacy, specificity of disease treatment is an important goal of medicine, for it offers a promise of personalized therapy and disease cure. The present project, although itself not directly connected to treating disease, informs a potential new treatment modality that has intrinsic specificity and potentially minimal side effects. The intellectual merit of the project lies in a new paradigm that focuses on synthesizing new concepts for molecule specific interaction with nonionizing electromagnetic radiation. The project combines scientific and technical expertise from multiple disciplines, including theoretical and experimental physics, biochemistry, nanotechnology and optical spectroscopy. Five graduate students from three academic departments at two institutions will be engaged in forefront integrated science research with a common goal of obtaining proof-of-principle of the core concept which, if successful, will lead to substantial follow-on research and ultimately form the basis of the development of a new era of disease treatment. This project will explore a new physics-based technique that could contribute to the treatment of various human diseases, including infectious and noninfectious disease, Alzheimer's, etc., and eventually even to treatment of cancer and aging. The technique employs nonionizing, "structured" electromagnetic radiation for ultrafast, massively-parallel and highly selective dissociation of target biostructures, such as large organic molecules and various forms of nucleic acids (viral DNA or RNA genomes as well as bacterial genomes) and proteins (mutant or prion, etc.), in vivo. The structured radiation will be highly tailored in the time and frequency domains, in the mid-infrared (IR) and far infrared / THz ranges and, to retain selectivity, will be carefully tuned into the moderately-nonlinear intensity domain. Modulation techniques will be used to overcome the field penetration problem. This project represents the first step toward this goal. It is clearly "high risk-high payoff", and necessarily interdisciplinary.