Skip to main content
An official website of the European UnionAn official EU website
European Commission logo
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS
CORDIS Web 30th anniversary CORDIS Web 30th anniversary
Content archived on 2024-06-18

Multiphoton Ionization Nano-Therapy

Objective

The application of nanotechnology for addressing key problems in clinical diagnosis and therapy holds great promise in medicine and in cancer in particular. Recent works have shown significant progress in nanoparticle-mediated drug delivery and therapy. In these applications, however, the small dimensions of the nanoparticles have been used primarily for efficient delivery and specificity, while the effects mediated by the nanoparticles occur away from the particle itself, affecting the entire cell\tumour volume. We propose to study and develop, for the first time, a novel scheme for cancer therapy that treats cancer cells at nanoscale resolutions. Briefly, when noble-metal nanoparticles are illuminated with femtosecond laser pulses tuned to their plasmonic resonance, order-of-magnitude enhancements of the optical fields several nanometres away from their surfaces lead to local damage only to nearby molecules or cellular organelles. This process, which practically involves no toxic agents, is at the basis for this proposal; we will utilize techniques for targeting nanoparticles to cells, initiate and control cancer cell destruction using nanoparticles and femtosecond laser pulses, and develop technology for conducting image-guided minimally invasive cancer therapy in remote locations of the body. Preliminary results supporting the proposed scheme include nonlinear optical imaging and ablation of living cells, in vivo endoscopic imaging of cancerous tumour nodules, and computer simulations of light-nanoparticle interactions. Using state-of-the-art concepts in nanotechnology, biology, chemistry, and medicine, the proposed novel multidisciplinary research will attempt at offering a feasible and safe addition to existing forms of cancer therapy.

Fields of science

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.

Call for proposal

ERC-2009-StG
See other projects for this call

Host institution

TECHNION - ISRAEL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
EU contribution
€ 1 782 600,00
Address
SENATE BUILDING TECHNION CITY
32000 Haifa
Israel

See on map

Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Principal investigator
Dvir Yelin (Dr.)
Administrative Contact
Mark Davison (Mr.)
Links
Total cost
No data

Beneficiaries (1)