EAGER: Selective Biodamage with Shaped THz Light Fields

迄今为止，科学家们只开发了非常少的几种治疗人类疾病的方法：药物、辐射（光子和粒子辐射、聚焦超声）和手术。这些方面的进展仍在继续，旨在减少副作用的努力也在继续。除了疗效之外，疾病治疗的特异性是医学的一个重要目标，因为它为个性化治疗和疾病治愈提供了希望。目前的项目虽然本身与疾病治疗没有直接联系，但它提供了一种具有内在特异性和潜在最小副作用的潜在新治疗方式。该项目的智力价值在于一个新的范式，重点是合成与非电离电磁辐射的分子特异性相互作用的新概念。该项目结合了多个学科的科学和技术专长，包括理论和实验物理、生物化学、纳米技术和光谱学。来自两个机构三个学术部门的五名研究生将从事前沿综合科学研究，其共同目标是获得核心概念的原理证明，如果成功，将导致大量后续研究，并最终形成疾病治疗新时代发展的基础。该项目将探索一种新的基于物理的技术，这种技术可能有助于治疗各种人类疾病，包括传染性和非传染性疾病、阿尔茨海默氏症等，最终甚至有助于治疗癌症和衰老。该技术利用非电离的“结构化”电磁辐射，在体内超快、大规模平行和高度选择性地解离目标生物结构，如大型有机分子和各种形式的核酸（病毒DNA或RNA基因组以及细菌基因组）和蛋白质（突变体或朊病毒等）。结构辐射将在中红外（IR）和远红外/太赫兹范围内的时间和频率域进行高度定制，并且为了保持选择性，将仔细调谐到适度非线性强度域。调制技术将用于克服场穿透问题。这个项目是实现这一目标的第一步。这显然是“高风险-高回报”，而且必然是跨学科的。

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.