UCLA engineers develop new optical microscope for cell analysis.

The ability to distinguish and isolate rare cells from among a large population of assorted cells has become increasingly important for the early detection of disease and for monitoring disease treatments.

Circulating cancer tumor cells are a perfect example. Typically, there are only a handful of them among a billion healthy cells, yet they are precursors to metastasis, the spread of cancer that causes about 90 percent of cancer mortalities. Such “rogue” cells are not limited to cancer — they also include stem cells used for regenerative medicine and other cell types.

Unfortunately, detecting such cells is difficult. Achieving good statistical accuracy requires an automated, high-throughput instrument that can examine millions of cells in a reasonably short time. Microscopes equipped with digital cameras are currently the gold standard for analyzing cells, but they are too slow to be useful for this application.

Now, a new optical microscope developed by UCLA engineers could make the tough task a whole lot easier.

“To catch these elusive cells, the camera must be able to capture and digitally process millions of images continuously at a very high frame rate,” said Bahram Jalali, who holds the Northrop Grumman Endowed Opto-Electronic Chair in Electrical Engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. “Conventional CCD and CMOS cameras are not fast and sensitive enough. It takes time to read the data from the array of pixels, and they become less sensitive to light at high speed.”

The current flow-cytometry method has high throughput, but since it relies on single-point light scattering, as opposed to taking a picture, it is not sensitive enough to detect very rare cell types, such as those present in early-stage or pre-metastasis cancer patients.

To overcome these limitations, an interdisciplinary team of researchers led by Jalali and Dino Di Carlo, a UCLA associate professor of bioengineering, with expertise in optics and high-speed electronics, microfluidics and biotechnology, has developed a high-throughput flow-through optical microscope with the ability to detect rare cells with sensitivity of one part per million in real time.

This technology builds on the photonic time-stretch camera technology created by Jalali’s team in 2009 to produce the world’s fastest continuous-running camera.

In the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jalali, Di Carlo and their colleagues describe how they integrated this camera with advanced microfluidics and real-time image processing in order to classify cells in blood samples. The new blood-screening technology boasts a throughput of 100,000 cells per second, approximately 100 times higher than conventional imaging-based blood analyzers.

“This achievement required the integration of several cutting-edge technologies through collaborations between the departments of bioengineering and electrical engineering and the California NanoSystems Institute and adds to the significant technology infrastructure being developed at UCLA for cell-based diagnostics,” Di Carlo said.

Both Jalali and Di Carlo are members of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.

Their research demonstrates real-time identification of rare breast cancer cells in blood with a record low false-positive rate of one cell in a million. Preliminary results indicate that this new technology has the potential to quickly enable the detection of rare circulating tumor cells from a large volume of blood, opening the way for statistically accurate early detection of cancer and for monitoring the efficiency of drug and radiation therapy.

“This technology can significantly reduce errors and costs in medical diagnosis,” said lead author Keisuke Goda, a UCLA program manager in electrical engineering and bioengineering.

The results were obtained by mixing cancer cells grown in a laboratory with blood in various proportions to emulate real-life patient blood.

“To further validate the clinical utility of the technology, we are currently performing clinical tests in collaboration with clinicians,” said Goda, also a member of the California NanoSystems Institute. “The technology is also potentially useful for urine analysis, water quality monitoring and related applications.”

The study was funded by the U.S. Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP) and by NantWorks LLC and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

Findings suggest possibility of using cellular cue to rescuing cell health.

Jing Xu, UC Merced

A discovery by a UC Merced biophysicist has moved science a step closer toward fine-tuning cell functions and combating certain diseases.

Professor Jing Xu found that a cell’s nanomotor can be activated by a cellular cue often lacking in people suffering from neurodegeneration.

“What we see is quite dramatic,” Xu said. “There’s a significant increase in the population of active nanomotors.”

While many people may think of a cell being like a soup with genetic material, Xu said cells are very organized and more like a city. In this metaphor, nanomotors are cars that shuttle material between the cell and its membrane. The ability to tune motor function could be important for tuning cell function.

Xu looked at the nanomotor called kinesin-1. Kinesin-1 is the main workhorse for transporting materials out to the cell periphery. Defects with this nanomotor are linked to diseases including neurodegeneration. She then added casein kinase 2, which is an important cellular cue that is lacking in a number of neurodgenerations. A direct effect of casein kinase 2 on kinesin-1 motor function was not established until this study.

“We have identified one cellular cue that could act as a flip switch to turn on the motor protein,” she said. “We’re one step closer to playing traffic cop within a cell.”

Xu published her findings, “Casein kinase 2 reverses tail-independent inactivation of kinesin-1,” in Nature Communications last month. Nature Communications is an online-only, multidisciplinary journal focused on publishing high-quality research in all areas of the biological, physical and chemical sciences.

The findings identify a novel pathway for regulating nanomotor function, and suggest the possibility of using cellular cue to rescuing cell health.

One way of looking at a disease is that it’s a readout for the importance of certain cellular cues happening within a cell, Xu explained. By changing those cues, scientists can gain fundamental understanding on how diseases might occur, and how they might prevent or combat diseases.

Xu conducted her postdoctoral work at UC Irvine, before accepting a professorship at UC Merced. She arrived on campus last year. She’s begun a collaboration with professor Ajay Gopinathan.

“UC Merced a very interdisciplinary school,” she said. “It’s an exciting and vibrant environment.”

“A huge step forward in the safety screening of nanomaterials,” researchers say.

Andre Nel (right), UCLA

Engineered nanomaterials, prized for their unique semiconducting properties, are already prevalent in everyday consumer products — from sunscreens, cosmetics and paints to textiles and solar batteries — and economic forecasters are predicting the industry will grow into $1 trillion business in the next few years. But how safe are these materials?

Because the semiconductor properties of metal-oxide nanomaterials could potentially translate into health hazards for humans, animals and the environment, it is imperative, researchers say, to develop a method for rapidly testing these materials to determine the potential hazards and take appropriate preventative action.

To that end, UCLA researchers and their colleagues have developed a novel screening technology that allows large batches of these metal-oxide nanomaterials to be assessed quickly, based on their ability to trigger certain biological responses in cells as a result of their semiconductor properties. The research is published in the journal ACS Nano.

Just as semiconductors can inject or extract electrons from industrial materials, semiconducting metal-oxide nanomaterials can have an electron-transfer effect when they come into contact with human cells that contain electronically active molecules, the researchers found. And while these oxidation-reduction reactions are helpful in industry, when they occur in the body they have the potential to generate oxygen radicals, which are highly reactive oxygen molecules that damage cells, triggering acute inflammation in the lungs of exposed humans and animals.

In a key finding, the research team predicted that metal-oxide nanomaterials and electronically active molecules in the body must have similar electron energy levels — called band-gap energy in the case of the nanomaterial — for this hazardous electron transfer to occur and oxidative damage to result.

Based on this prediction, the researchers screened 24 metal-oxide nanoparticles to determine which were most likely to lead to toxicity under real-life exposure. Using a high-throughput screening assay (performed by robotic equipment and an automated image-capture microscope), they tested the two dozen materials on a variety of cell types in a matter of a few hours and found that six of them — those that had previously met the researchers’ predictive criteria for being toxic based on their band-gap energy — led to oxidative damage in cells.

The team then tested the nanomaterials in well-orchestrated animal studies and found that only those materials that had led to oxidative damage in cells were capable of generating inflammation in the lungs of mice, confirming the researchers’ band-gap hypothesis.

“The ability to make such predictions, starting with cells in a test tube, and extrapolating the results to intact animals and humans exposed to potentially hazardous metal oxides, is a huge step forward in the safety screening of nanomaterials,” said senior author Dr. Andre Nel, chief of the division of nanomedicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA and director of the University of California Center for Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology.

According to the researchers, this new safety-assessment technology has the potential to replace traditional testing, which is currently performed one material at a time in labor-intensive animal studies using a “wait-and-see” approach that doesn’t reveal why the implicated nanomaterials could be hazardous. The UCLA team’s predictive approach and screening technique could speed up the ability to assess large numbers of emerging new nanomaterials rather than waiting for their toxicological potential to become manifest before action is taken.

“Being able to integrate metal-oxide electronic properties into a predictive and high-throughput scientific platform in this work could play an important role in advancing nanomaterial safety testing in the 21st century to a preventative strategy, rather than waiting for problems to emerge,” Nel said.

Another major advantage of an approach based on the assessment of nanomaterials’ properties is that one can identify those properties that could potentially be redesigned to make the materials less hazardous, the researchers said.

The implementation of high-throughput screening is also leading to the development of computer tools that assist in prediction-making; in the future, much of the safety assessment of nanomaterials could be carried out using computer programs that perform smart modeling and simulation procedures based on electronic properties.

“We can now further refine the testing of an important class of engineered nanomaterials to the level where regulatory agencies can make use of our predictions and testing methods,” said Haiyuan Zhang, a postdoctoral research scholar at the Center for Environmental Implicatioons of Nanotechnology at UCLA’s CNSI and the lead author of the study.

The UCLA research team included investigators from the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA; the UCLA Division of Nanomedicine; the UCLA departments of medicine, biostatistics, chemical and bimolecular engineering, and chemistry; and the CNSI’s Molecular Shared Screening Resource at CNSI. Collaborators included researchers from the IWT Foundation Institute of Materials Science and the department of engineering at the University of Bremen, in Germany, and the department of d’enginyeria informatica i matematiques at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, in Catalunya, Spain.

The California NanoSystems Institute is an integrated research facility located at UCLA and UC Santa Barbara. Its mission is to foster interdisciplinary collaborations in nanoscience and nanotechnology; to train a new generation of scientists, educators and technology leaders; to generate partnerships with industry; and to contribute to the economic development and the social well-being of California, the United States and the world. The CNSI was established in 2000 with $100 million from the state of California. The total amount of research funding in nanoscience and nanotechnology awarded to CNSI members has risen to over $900 million. UCLA CNSI members are drawn from UCLA’s College of Letters and Science, the David Geffen School of Medicine, the School of Dentistry, the School of Public Health and the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. They are engaged in measuring, modifying and manipulating atoms and molecules – the building blocks of our world. Their work is carried out in an integrated laboratory environment. This dynamic research setting has enhanced understanding of phenomena at the nanoscale and promises to produce important discoveries in health, energy, the environment and information technology.

UCLA-developed platform lets health workers accurately read diagnostic tests in the field.

In the fight against emerging public health threats, early diagnosis of infectious diseases is crucial. And in poor and remote areas of the globe where conventional medical tools like microscopes and cytometers are unavailable, rapid diagnostic tests, or RDTs, are helping to make disease screening quicker and simpler.

RDTs are generally small strips on which blood or fluid samples are placed. Specific changes in the color of the strip, which usually occur within minutes, indicate the presence of infection. Different tests can be used to detect various diseases, including HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and syphilis.

While the advantages of RDTs are significant — better disease-management, more efficient surveillance of outbreaks in high-risk areas and the ability of minimally trained technicians to test large number of individuals — they can also present problems.

“Conventional RDTs are currently read manually, by eye, which is prone to error, especially if various different types of tests are being used by the health care worker,” said Aydogan Ozcan, a UCLA professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering.

To address such challenges, Ozcan and his colleagues from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA have developed a compact and cost-effective RDT-reading device that works in tandem with standard cell phones.

“What we have created is a digital ‘universal’ reader for all RDTs, without any manual decision-making,” he said.

The RDT-reader attachment, which clips onto a cell phone, weighs approximately 65 grams and includes an inexpensive lens, three LED arrays and two AAA batteries. The platform has the ability to read nearly every type of RDT. An RDT strip is inserted into the attachment, and with the help of cell phone’s existing camera unit and a special smart-phone application, the strip is converted into a digital image.

The platform then rapidly reads the digitized RTD image to determine, first, whether the test is valid and, second, whether the results are positive or negative, thus eliminating the potential errors that can occur with a human reader, especially one administering multiple tests of various test types. And because the color changes in RDTs don’t last more than a few hours in the field, the ability to store the digitized image indefinitely provides an added benefit.

After this step, the RDT-reader platform wirelessly transmits the results of the tests to a global server, which processes them, stores them and, using Google Maps, creates maps charting the spread of various diseases and conditions — both geographically and over time — throughout the world.

Together, the universal RDT reader and the mapping feature, which have been implemented on both iPhones and Android-based smart-phones, could significantly increase our ability to track emerging epidemics worldwide and aid in epidemic preparedness, the researchers say.

“This platform would be quite useful for global health professionals, as well as for policymakers, to understand cause-effect relationships at a much larger scale for combating infectious diseases,” Ozcan said.

The research is published in the journal Lab on a Chip.

Additional authors of the study include Onur Mudanyali (first author), Stoyan Dimitrov, Uzair Sikora, Swati Padmanabhan and Isa Navruz, all of the department of electrical engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Ozcan and his UCLA research team have been developing a variety of cell-phone attachments that utilize the digital components already embedded in standard cell phones to aid in the fight against global disease. With more than 5 billion cell-phone subscribers around the world today, cell phones can play a central role in telemedicine applications, and existing wireless telecommunications infrastructure presents new opportunities for innovative cloud-based health-monitoring and management platforms, the researchers say.

For more on their work, visit http://innovate.ee.ucla.edu and http://bit.ly/IfkY6n.

Funding for the Ozcan Research Group is provided by the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the ARO Young Investigator Award, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (BISH program), the ONR Young Investigator Award, and the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award.

The California NanoSystems Institute is an integrated research facility located at UCLA and UC Santa Barbara. Its mission is to foster interdisciplinary collaborations in nanoscience and nanotechnology; to train a new generation of scientists, educators and technology leaders; to generate partnerships with industry; and to contribute to the economic development and the social well-being of California, the United States and the world. The CNSI was established in 2000 with $100 million from the state of California. The total amount of research funding in nanoscience and nanotechnology awarded to CNSI members has risen to over $900 million. UCLA CNSI members are drawn from UCLA’s College of Letters and Science, the David Geffen School of Medicine, the School of Dentistry, the School of Public Health and the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. They are engaged in measuring, modifying and manipulating atoms and molecules — the building blocks of our world. Their work is carried out in an integrated laboratory environment. This dynamic research setting has enhanced understanding of phenomena at the nanoscale and promises to produce important discoveries in health, energy, the environment and information technology.

The UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, established in 1945, offers 28 academic and professional degree programs and has an enrollment of more than 5,000 students. The school’s distinguished faculty are leading research to address many of the critical challenges of the 21st century, including renewable energy, clean water, health care, wireless sensing and networking, and cybersecurity. Ranked among the top 10 engineering schools at public universities nationwide, the school is home to nine multimillion-dollar interdisciplinary research centers in wireless sensor systems, nanoelectronics, nanomedicine, renewable energy, customized computing, and the smart grid, all funded by federal and private agencies.

UC Santa Barbara research points toward potential for a new nanoscale sensing technique.

Ania Bleszynski Jayich, UC Santa Barbara

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on the nanoscale and the ever-elusive quantum computer are among the advancements edging closer toward the realm of possibility, and a new study co-authored by a UC Santa Barbara researcher may give both an extra nudge. The findings appear today (Feb. 23) in Science Express, an online version of the journal Science.

Ania Bleszynski Jayich, an assistant professor of physics who joined the UCSB faculty in 2010, spent a year at Harvard working on an experiment that coupled nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond to nanomechanical resonators. That project is the basis for the new paper, “Coherent sensing of a mechanical resonator with a single spin qubit.”

A nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center is a specific defect in diamond that exhibits a quantum magnetic behavior known as spin. When a single spin in diamond is coupled with a magnetic mechanical resonator –– a device used to generate or select specific frequencies –– it points toward the potential for a new nanoscale sensing technique with implications for biology and technology, Jayich explained.

Among those possible future applications of such a technique is magnetic resonance imaging on a scale small enough to image the structure of proteins –– an as-yet unaccomplished feat that Jayich called “one of the holy grails of structural biology.”

“The same physics that will allow the NV center to detect the magnetic field of the resonator, hopefully, will allow MRI on the nanoscale,” Jayich said. “It could make MRI more accurate, and able to see more. It’s like having a camera with eight megapixels versus one with two megapixels and taking a picture of someone’s face. You can’t see features that are smaller than the size of a pixel. So do they have three freckles, or do they all look like one big freckle?

“That’s the idea,” Jayich continued. “To resolve individual freckles, so to speak, to see what a protein is made up of. What we found in this paper suggests that it is possible, although a significant amount of work still needs to be done.”

Though further into the future based on the approach used for this paper, Jayich said, there is also the potential for such a coupling to be advanced and exploited as a possible route toward the development of a hybrid quantum system, or quantum computer.

Jayich collaborated on the project with researchers Shimon Kolkowitz, Quirin Unterreithmeier, Steven Bennett and Mikhail Lukin, all from Harvard; Peter Rabl, from the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Science; and J.G.E. Harris, from Yale. The work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, the Center for Ultracold Atoms and the Packard Foundation.

UCLA engineers develop cost-effective cell-phone attachment that acts as fluorescent microscope.

Cell phone-based E. coli detector

FINDINGS:
Researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a new cell phone–based fluorescent imaging and sensing platform that can detect the presence of the bacterium Escherichia coli in food and water. The engineers combined antibody functionalized glass capillaries with quantum dots (semiconductors often used for medical imaging) as signal reporters to specifically detect E. coli particles in liquid samples using a lightweight, compact attachment to an existing cell-phone camera.

Using battery-powered, inexpensive light-emitting diodes (LEDs), the researchers can excite/pump labeled E. coli particles captured on the capillary surface; there, emissions from the quantum dots can be imaged with the cell-phone camera, using an additional lens inserted between the capillary and the cell phone.

The cost-effective cell-phone attachment acts as a florescent microscope, quantifying the emitted light from each capillary after the specific capture of E. coli particles within a sample. By quantifying the florescent light emission from each tube, the concentration of E. coli in the sample can be determined.

IMPACT:
E. coli can easily contaminate food and drinking water. It poses a significant threat to public health, even in highly developed parts of the world, and causes a large number of hospitalizations and deaths every year. As few as 10–100 E. coli particles can kill the cells of the intestinal lining, destroy the kidneys and cause blood clots in the brain, as well as seizures, paralysis and respiratory failure.

This study illustrates the promising potential of a cell phone–enabled, field-portable and cost-effective E. coli detection platform for the screening of both water and food samples.

AUTHORS:
Authors of the research include UCLA electrical engineering postdoctoral scholar Hongying Zhu; UCLA electrical engineering undergraduate student Uzair Sikora; and UCLA associate professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering Aydogan Ozcan. Ozcan is also a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. More on Ozcan’s research group can be found at http://innovate.ee.ucla.edu.

FUNDING:
The Ozcan Research Group is funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Office.

JOURNAL:
The research is published in the peer-reviewed journal The Royal Society of Chemistry and is available online at http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2012/an/c2an35071h.

Former patient uses iPhone word game app to raise funds for pediatric cancer research.

Cameron Cohen

When he was 11, Cameron Cohen created the hit drawing app iSketch for the iPhone and donated $20,000 of the proceeds from its sales to the Chase Child Life program at Mattel Children’s Hospital UCLA.

Now 13, he’s at it again. This time, the eighth-grader has created another app for iPhones and iPads called AnimalGrams (and AnimalGrams HD). Cameron’s goal with this new game is to raise funds to support pediatric cancer research at UCLA.

“After having made iSketch, a productivity app, I chose to create a pick-up-and-play–type of game, because those are the types of games that seem the most popular on the iPhone,” he said. “AnimalGrams is a fun and challenging anagram-style word game where you have to un-scramble letters to form words. Each letter tile is in the shape of an animal — hence the name AnimalGrams.”

Cameron’s road to philanthropy and app development started in March 2009, when he was a patient at UCLA Medical Center–Santa Monica, part of the UCLA Health System, where he underwent surgery for what turned out to be a benign bone tumor.

He remained hospitalized for 10 days and then headed home to recuperate in a bulky leg brace that sidelined him from playing sports. To stay busy, he taught himself the programming language for iPhone applications, watched online iTunes University lectures and studied Apple manuals and tutorials. He decided to develop an inexpensive app for drawing on the iPhone and ultimately came up with iSketch.

In November 2009, Apple Inc. accepted iSketch, and it quickly became a big hit. Cameron then donated $20,000 of the proceeds to help buy electronic and entertainment items for other pre-teens and teens to enjoy during their hospitalization at UCLA.

“I had great care in the hospital,” Cameron said. And while he was fortunate to have his iPod with him for entertainment during his hospitalization, “other kids in the hospital need things to help make them feel better too,” he said.

This time around, the young humanitarian will be donating a substantial portion of the proceeds from sales of both AnimalGrams and iSketch to Dr. Noah Federman, an assistant professor of pediatric hematology–oncology and director of the pediatric bone and soft tissue sarcoma program at Mattel Children’s Hospital UCLA.

Federman’s research focuses on using targeted nanoparticles to treat pediatric sarcomas, which are aggressive and often lethal cancers of the bone and soft tissue. The survival rate for patients with these types of cancers when they have spread or relapsed is about 20 percent, even with aggressive chemotherapy, surgery and radiation treatments.

“I’m excited about supporting the research of Dr. Federman because I feel that his research on treatment of pediatric bone cancer using nanoparticles is extremely innovative and will hopefully lead to breakthroughs that will make an incredible difference in many kids’ lives,” Cameron said. ”I feel a direct connection to his research, as I had a tumor in my leg bone, though mine was fortunately benign.”

Read more about Cameron and his apps on his website, www.cccdev.com.

Mattel Children’s Hospital UCLA, one of the highest-rated children’s hospitals in California and a vital component of Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, offers a full spectrum of primary and specialized medical care for infants, children and adolescents. The hospital’s mission is to provide state-of-the-art treatment for children in a compassionate atmosphere and to improve the understanding and treatment of pediatric diseases.

UC Irvine findings could aid in early cancer diagnosis.

A disease-fighting protein in our teardrops has been tethered to a tiny transistor, enabling UC Irvine scientists to discover exactly how it destroys dangerous bacteria. The research could prove critical to long-term work aimed at diagnosing cancers and other illnesses in their very early stages.

Ever since Nobel laureate Alexander Fleming found that human tears contain antiseptic proteins called lysozymes about a century ago, scientists have tried to solve the mystery of how they could relentlessly wipe out far larger bacteria. It turns out that lysozymes have jaws that latch on and chomp through rows of cell walls like someone hungrily devouring an ear of corn, according to findings that will be published Friday (Jan. 20) in the journal Science.

“Those jaws chew apart the walls of the bacteria that are trying to get into your eyes and infect them,” said molecular biologist and chemistry professor Gregory Weiss, who co-led the project with associate professor of physics & astronomy Philip Collins.

The researchers decoded the protein’s behavior by building one of the world’s smallest transistors — 25 times smaller than similar circuitry in laptop computers or smartphones. Individual lysozymes were glued to the live wire, and its eating activities were monitored.

“Our circuits are molecule-sized microphones,” Collins said. “It’s just like a stethoscope listening to your heart, except we’re listening to a single molecule of protein.”

It took years for the UC Irvine scientists to assemble the transistor and attach single-molecule teardrop proteins. The scientists hope the same novel technology can be used to detect cancerous molecules. It could take a decade to figure out, but would be well worth it, said Weiss, who lost his father to lung cancer.

“If we can detect single molecules associated with cancer, then that means we’d be able to detect it very, very early,” Weiss said. “That would be very exciting, because we know that if we treat cancer early, it will be much more successful, patients will be cured much faster, and costs will be much less.”

The project was sponsored by the National Cancer Institute and the National Science Foundation. Co-authors of the Science paper are Yongki Choi, Issa Moody, Patrick Sims, Steven Hunt, Brad Corso and Israel Perez.

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UC Irvine is a top-ranked university dedicated to research, scholarship and community service. Led by Chancellor Michael Drake since 2005, UC Irvine is among the most dynamic campuses in the University of California system, with nearly 28,000 undergraduate and graduate students, 1,100 faculty and 9,000 staff. Orange County’s second-largest employer, UC Irvine contributes an annual economic impact of $4 billion. For more news, visit www.today.uci.edu.

Turns cell phone into powerful microscope.

A groundbreaking imaging technology developed by UCLA engineering professor Aydogan Ozcan that can turn a simple cell phone into a powerful microscope has been named the top innovation of 2011 by The Scientist, a magazine focusing on the life sciences, research and technology. Ozcan’s compact, lightweight and inexpensive microscope has the potential to bring better health care and monitoring to impoverished and underserved areas of the globe.

The technology, known as LUCAS (Ultra–wide-field Cell monitoring Array platform based on Shadow imaging), was ranked No. 1 among a field of more than 65 entries judged by the magazine as part of its annual “Top 10 Innovations” contest. Other winners in the top 10 included a new high-powered DNA sequencer, a mini-MRI system, a watch-like device that measures the body’s circadian rhythm, and a first-of-its-kind 360-degree optical imager.

Ozcan’s LUCAS is an easy-to-use, pocket-sized holographic microscope that weighs less than 50 grams, uses off-the-shelf parts and costs as little as $10. It can be attached to a cell phone’s camera, and blood and saliva samples can then be loaded onto chips that slide into the side of the microscope. The technology can be used to monitor diseases like HIV and malaria and to test water quality in the field after a major disaster.

Algorithms developed by Ozcan’s research group instantly identify and count red and white blood cells and microparticles in the fluid samples, a time-consuming process typically performed by trained technicians. The image results can be sent by the cell phone to centralized hospitals for analysis by health care professionals.

“We have more than 5 billion cell phone subscribers around the world today, and because of this, cell phones can now play a central role in telemedicine applications,” said Ozcan, an associate professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering at UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. “Our research group has already created a very nice set of tools that can potentially replace most of the advanced instruments used currently in laboratories.”

Ozcan has garnered a great deal of media attention and professional recognition in recent years for his work on lensless computational microscopy. He’s been honored with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award, and Office of Naval Research and Army Research Office Young Investigator awards, among others.

The lensless imaging platform behind the cell phone microscope is already undergoing real-world trials. Field tests of the cell phone microscope began in Africa last summer using funds received from three major awards. Next year, Karin Nielsen, an infectious diseases pediatrician at UCLA, will take the portable microscope into the fields of the Amazon to test its ability to diagnose malaria, anemia, low white blood-cell count and intestinal parasites.

For more on Ozcan’s research, visit http://innovate.ee.ucla.edu.

Grants will support research on cell mechanics and the genetics of common diseases.

David Segal, UC Davis

The W.M. Keck Foundation has awarded $2 million in grants to the University of California, Davis, for research on cell mechanics and the genetics of common diseases.

Professors Gang-Yu Liu, Department of Chemistry, and Ian Kennedy, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, received $1 million to develop a new instrument for measuring the mechanics of single cells and using it to study the toxicity of nanoparticles. Associate professor David Segal, Department of Pharmacology, was awarded $1 million to take a novel approach to identifying genetic changes associated with heart disease.

UC Davis is one of only three institutions to receive grants from the foundation’s medical research program this year, and one of only six institutions to receive grants from the foundation’s science and engineering research program.

Liu and Kennedy will use their grant to develop a microscope that can measure the stiffness and other mechanical properties of individual cells, as well as see activity inside them. The new instrument will combine a confocal microscope, which can focus on layers within a living cell, with an atomic force microscope, which can study surfaces in exquisite detail as well as press a tiny bead against a cell and measure its resistance.

Gang-Yu Liu, UC Davis

“We are very excited to accept this grant and extremely grateful to the Keck Foundation for this and past support,” said Winston Ko, dean of the Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences in the College of Letters and Science.

The foundation’s total philanthropic support to UC Davis exceeds $7.9 million, including previous major grants to faculty to support work on the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile and the Keck Center for Active Visualization in Earth Sciences, housed at UC Davis.

“I have every reason to believe that professor Liu’s research will lead to the same level of discovery and innovation,” Ko said.

Liu’s laboratory has already demonstrated the potential of the microscope concept in experiments with nerve cells, which become stiffer when they are affected by the prion proteins related to Alzheimer’s disease. The new instrument will be able to test a wider range of cell types and incorporate other features that make it easier to use with live cells, Liu said.

Liu and Kennedy now plan to use the microscope to test whether early signs of damage to endothelial cells — which line the blood vessels and airways, for example — show up as changes in the cells’ mechanical properties. The experiments will use novel nanoparticles made by Kennedy’s lab, which combine tiny particles of metal oxides — similar to particles that are widespread in the environment, and that are also becoming common in products such as sunscreens — with gold or other elements that allow the particles to be tracked within cells.

The new microscope will help to answer questions that are difficult to address with current technology. Zinc oxides, for example, are used in some sunscreens and also occur naturally in the environment. There is some evidence that they can cause damage to cells, but no clear scientific consensus about how serious the problem is, Kennedy said.

Read more

Innovative machine learning method anticipates neurocognitive changes.

Ariana Anderson, UCLA

At UCLA’s Laboratory of Integrative Neuroimaging Technology, researchers use functional MRI brain scans to observe brain signal changes that take place during mental activity. They then employ computerized machine learning (ML) methods to study these patterns and identify the cognitive state — or sometimes the thought process — of human subjects. The technique is called “brain reading” or “brain decoding.”

In a new study, the UCLA research team describes several crucial advances in this field, using fMRI and machine learning methods to perform “brain reading” on smokers experiencing nicotine cravings.

The research, presented last week at the Neural Information Processing Systems’ Machine Learning and Interpretation in Neuroimaging workshop in Spain, was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which is interested in using these method to help people control drug cravings.

In this study on addiction and cravings, the team classified data taken from cigarette smokers who were scanned while watching videos meant to induce nicotine cravings. The aim was to understand in detail which regions of the brain and which neural networks are responsible for resisting nicotine addiction specifically, and cravings in general, said Ariana Anderson, a postdoctoral fellow in the Integrative Neuroimaging Technology lab and the study’s lead author.

“We are interested in exploring the relationships between structure and function in the human brain, particularly as related to higher-level cognition, such as mental imagery,” Anderson said. “The lab is engaged in the active exploration of modern data-analysis approaches, such as machine learning, with special attention to methods that reveal systems-level neural organization.”

Read more

UCSF bioengineer working to create tiny devices that can treat diabetes or kidney failure.

Tejal Desai, UC San Francisco

The same technology used to create integrated circuits may one day be applied to the body to deliver medicine or serve as implants that act as an artificial organ. Tejal Desai, a bioengineer at the University of California, San Francisco, is working with microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, to create tiny devices that can treat diabetes or kidney failure. But Desai says they’re also looking at different devices which one could potentially inject via catheter.

“Eventually, the goal is to create an implant that actually would just be a simple injection and that injection would be able to have a device,” Desai said. “It’s made out of a really thin film of polymer material and has small channels that can deliver drugs for many months. “

Read more