e driver is actually there; you just can't see it because your eye is being saturated with the glare," he said. "But put on a pair of polarized sunglasses to take away the glare, and you can see the driver. Our holographic approach gets rid of the light scattered by skin and tissue, and we uncover the image-bearing light that is already there."
The newly developed tissue dynamics spectroscopy used in Nolte's technology creates an image similar to a voice print used in voice-recognition security software. This voice print shows changes taking place inside the cells.
"After making the hologram, my colleagues and I use spectroscopy to measure the time-dependent changes in the hologram," Nolte said. "Fluctuation spectroscopy breaks down the changes into different frequencies, and we can tell how a cell's membranes, mitochondria, nucleus and even cell division respond to drugs. We measure the frequency of the light fluctuations as a function of time after a drug is applied."
The resulting colorful frequency-versus-time spectrogram represents a unique voice-print of the drug used on the cells.
"We've discovered that individual drugs have quite different spectrograms, but with similarities within specific classes of drugs," Nolte said. "By looking at how the cell motion is responding to drugs, we can differentiate very fine mechanistic points between them."
Drug researchers and manufacturers may benefit from seeing how various drug candidates affect organ-like structures inside a cell - including the mitochondria and nucleus - by being able to more quickly determine which drug candidates are most effective in battling tumors and other tissue diseases.
"There are thousands of drug candidates that may be beneficial in some way, but they need to be screened quickly and cheaply. Then drug manufacturers can spend more money to develop them," Nolte said. "This technology, with its high-throughput aspect, allows manufacturers to place a different tumor into 384 plates, test 384 different drug compounds and create 384 spectrograms in six hours."
Nolte has patented the technology, and it is available for licensing through Joseph Trebley, senior project manager for the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization, at 765-588-3832, firstname.lastname@example.org.
Nolte was one of 10 finalists for the SLAS Innovation Award presented Feb. 2 at the LabAutomation 2011 conference at the Palm Springs (Calif.) Convention Center. He spoke about Holographic TDS at the conference.
Other nominees included Yama Abassi, ACEA Biosciences, San Diego; Dino Di Carlo, University of California, Los Angeles; Scott Fulton, BioSystem Development LLC, Madison, Wis.; Guillermo Garcia-Cardena, Harvard Medical School, Boston; Elliot Hui, University of California, Irvine; Michelle Khine, University of California, Irvine; Thomas Laurell, Lund University, Sweden; Kamlesh Patel, Sandia National Laboratories, Livermore, Calif.; Paul van Midwoud, University of Groningen, Netherlands.
About Purdue Research Foundation
Purdue Research Foundation is a private, nonprofit foundation created to advance the mission of Purdue University. The foundation accepts gifts; administers trusts; funds research, scholarships and grants; acquires property; and negotiates research contracts on behalf of Purdue. In the 1990s, the foundation was charged with helping the university in the realm of economic development. The Purdue Research Foundation oversees the Purdue Research Park, which is the largest university-affiliated business incubator in the country. In addition to the Purdue Research Park of West Lafayette, the foundation has established technology parks in other locations around Indiana including Indianapolis, Merrillville and New Albany.
About Office of Technology Commercialization
Purdue Research Foundation's Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) operates one of the most comprehensive technology transfer programs among leading research universities in the United States. Services provided by this office support the economic development initiatives of Pu