In this interview with MEDICA-tradefair.com, Professor Vahid Sandoghdar, one of the initiators of the Center for Physics and Medicine in Erlangen (ZPM), explains the primary objectives of the interdisciplinary interface and which researchers are meant to communicate with each other and details what the inclusion of biomechanical factors in medicine can accomplish in this setting.
Professor Sandoghdar, what insights do you hope to gain from the new Center?
Prof. Vahid Sandoghdar: We want to incorporate physical concepts and methods into basic medical research. Medical science has always collaborated with physicists to create diagnostic or imaging devices for example, which nowadays can be found in every hospital. Every operating and examination room is armed with technology, thus aspects of physics. In other words, physics has always had a big share in medical practice.
Our goal is for basic medical research to also take in the concepts of physics. At the moment, we tend to study diseases with biochemical, cell biology, or genetic methods. These are the types of laboratory processes and techniques we know from biology or medical studies. We believe that methods of physics or mathematical modeling can also play an important role in this setting. The ways of measuring and thinking in physics can also be applied in medical science.
Physicists are used to developing a whole array of equipment and machines to obtain a specific measurement, allowing them to measure with high accuracy – when measuring sugar content, pH levels or ion concentration in tissue for example. All of these methods can be enhanced to where we could also accurately measure at a microscale level. For example, this would allow us to identify individual proteins and their distribution in cells or tissue.
What does this imply for the early detection of diseases for example?
Sandoghdar: We want to develop methods that allow us to conduct highly sensitive measurements as we know them from biophysics in a medical context. You obtain new information when you measure, distinguish and understand everything at the molecular level down to the smallest detail. This can provide new input for people who develop drugs or try to cure diseases. The idea behind this is to use all the methods we know from microelectronics, nanotechnology, optical microscopy, microfluidics and nanofluidics to perform highly sensitive in situ analysis. For example, you can detect molecules with the help of fluorescence, yet there are also methods that work without fluorescent markers. There is a connection to methods like lab-on-a-chip.