Real-time, Molecular Brain Injury Diagnosis via a Novel Integrated Atomic Force and Confocal Fluorescence Microscope System
Abstract
Program Officer: Dr. Timothy Bentley, ONRAbstract - Approved for Public ReleaseAdvancing protection strategies for the warfighter relies on a clear understanding of the injury mechanisms behind current and emerging battlefield threats. The cellular and subcellular injury thresholds responsible for all blunt and blast related brain injuries thus must be resolved in order to develop and deploy the appropriate threat deterrents and protective equipment, i.e., the correlation between stimulated insult and the resulting biological and chemo-mechanical sequelae of the human cell and tissue must be fully understood. This requires molecular level sensitivity and spatiotemporal resolution of the complex mechanosensitive injury behavior of cells and tissues (such as soluble injury biomarkersecretion) during a specific insult. Over the past several years and with the support from the Office of Naval Research, we successfully developed experimental setups for studying the effect of blast and blunt injuries at the cellular and tissue level and are nowat a critical juncture to expand our efforts to the molecular scale -- detailing the molecular injury response and mechanism by providing unprecedented real-time molecular-level imaging access to the injury pathology. However, to perform these critical measurements with molecular and atomic accuracy and sensitivity, a combined system consisting of a bio-specialized atomic force microscope anda high-performance confocal microscope is required. The price point of these systems generally exceeds the budget capacity of regular grant mechanisms and thus is the subject of this DURIP application. A successful DURIP application will enable us to build such an integrated microscopy system enabling and revealing unprecedented new information about the biological and electrophysiological origin and sequelae of blunt, blast and ballistic injury threats.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jan 12, 2023
- Source ID
- N000142312229
Entities
People
- Christian Franck
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of Wisconsin System