Journal of Biotechnology & Biomaterials
Open Access

Abstract

Infrared, Raman and CARS are emerging tools for label-free non-invasive characterization of tissue, cells and body fluids. Thereby the pathological annotation of tissue and liquid biopsies maybe performed in automated workflow with high sensitivity and specificity over 95% respectively. Vibrational spectra are used as fingerprints to identify and annotate cancer in tissue, living cells and body fluids. The approach is applied to fresh frozen and formalin fixed paraffin embedded tissue samples. For the entities colon, bladder and lung data bases are established to characterize tissue in an automated way with sensitivity and specificity of over 90%. A bioinformatics work flow and a corresponding power-full computer cluster is established. While IR provides fast annotation of larger tissue sections, Raman is slower but allows a 10 times higher spatial resolution as compared to IR. This leads to resolve erythrocytes, lymphocytes and single cell nuclei in tissue sections by Raman imaging. The approach is extended for IR and Raman from tissue to small biopsies using thin fiber optics. Thereby, the measuring time is reduced to few seconds and can be used to annotate not only at the bench but now also at the bedside. We have used furthermore a combination of CARS, fluorescence, and multivariate analysis to identify in living cells automatically the nuclei, nucleoli, lipid droplets, endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus, and mitochondria in an automated way in short measuring time. In addition in blood-plasma the approach was able to distinguish between the inflammation and bladder cancer with over 90% sensitivity and specificity. In a hypothesis driven approach using the conformation of the a-beta protein as biomarker, we were able to distinguish between Alzheimer and non- Alzheimer diseased patients. An ATR-based sensor with functionalized surface is developed.

Biography

Email: gerwert@bph.rub.de