EAGER: Selective Biodamage with Shaped THz Light Fields

EAGER：利用成形太赫兹光场进行选择性生物损伤

• 批准号: 1748906
• 负责人: Krzysztof Kempa
• 金额: $ 30万
• 依托单位: Boston College
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-01-15 至 2020-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1748906&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: EAGER; Selective; Biodamage; Shaped; THz

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.

到目前为止，科学家们只开发了很少的几种治疗人类疾病的方法：药剂学，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，疾病治疗的特异性是医学的一个重要目标，因为它提供了个性化治疗和疾病治愈的希望。本项目虽然本身与治疗疾病没有直接联系，但提供了一种潜在的新治疗方式，具有内在的特异性和潜在的最小副作用。该项目的智力价值在于一个新的范式，重点是合成新的概念，分子与非电离电磁辐射的特定相互作用。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学、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，共同目标是获得核心概念的原理证明，如果成功，将导致大量的后续研究，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物理学-基于技术，可以有助于治疗各种人类疾病，包括感染性和非感染性疾病，阿尔茨海默氏症等，最终甚至用于治疗癌症和衰老。该技术采用非电离的、“结构化的”电磁辐射，用于目标生物结构的超快、平行和高选择性解离，所述目标生物结构例如大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），in vivo.结构化辐射将在时域和频域中、在中红外（IR）和远红外/ THz范围内进行高度定制，并且为了保持选择性，将被仔细调谐到适度非线性强度域中。调制技术将用于克服场穿透问题。该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。

项目成果

Towards spectrally selective catastrophic response

• DOI: 10.1103/physreve.101.062415
• 发表时间: 2020-06-18
• 期刊: PHYSICAL REVIEW E
• 影响因子: 2.4
• 作者: Gabriele, V. R.;Shvonski, A.;Kempa, K.
• 通讯作者: Kempa, K.