EAGER: Selective Biodamage with Shaped THz Light Fields

到目前为止，科学家们只开发了非常少数的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。所有这些方面的进展都在继续，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，因为它为个性化治疗和疾病治疗提供了希望。尽管本项目本身与治疗疾病没有直接联系，但它提供了一种潜在的新的治疗模式，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种新的范式，它专注于合成分子与非电离电磁辐射特定相互作用的新概念。该项目结合了多个学科的科学和技术专业知识，包括理论和实验物理、生物化学、纳米技术和光学光谱学。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，将导致大量后续研究，并最终形成疾病治疗新时代的基础。该项目将探索一种基于物理学的新技术，可能有助于治疗各种人类疾病，包括传染病和非传染性疾病、阿尔茨海默氏症等，甚至最终有助于癌症和衰老的治疗。这项技术利用非电离的“结构化”电磁辐射，在体内对目标生物结构进行超快、大规模平行和高选择性的解离，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(突变体或普恩等)。结构辐射将在时间和频率域、中红外(IR)和远红外/太赫兹范围内进行高度定制，并且为了保持选择性，将仔细地调谐到中等非线性强度域。调制技术将被用来克服场渗透问题。该项目是迈向这一目标的第一步。这显然是“高风险-高回报”的，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.