Czech scientist receives prestigious award for development of revolutionary microscope
Czech scientist Tomáš Čižmár has won the European Microscopy Society award for contributing to the development of a new, hair-thin endo-microscope, which allows detailed investigation of hard to access brain areas. The revolutionary instrument could help neuroscientists develop new tools for fighting severe neurological conditions, such as dementia or Alzhemier’s disease. I asked Professor Čimžár to tell me more about it:
“Our endoscope differs in that the flow of light through it is controlled by computer-generated and dynamic hologram. It is of course complex and technologically challenging, but it offers some very unique and interesting properties and possibilities for use in practice, because the dimensions of the instruments are very small and we get a very high resolution.”
I imagine it's also gentler than the conventional larger endoscopes…
“The endoscope is not designed primarily for use in human patients, but for the assistance in methods of neuroscience. So we exploit it on animal models and we use it to look into the brain.
“I should stress, first of all, that all our experiments are always conducted under strictest and ethical considerations and our experimental mice are never subjected to any preventable suffering.
“One of the key features of the holographic endoscopy is that the experiments are really gentle on the sensitive tissues and the endoscope is as thin as a hair.
“Compared to other competing methods being used currently, it offers approximately 10 to 100 times smaller volumes of the tissue being affected.”
As you said, scientists are already imaging neurons in the living brains of mice. What exactly are they looking at?
“For the first time, we are able to see the neurons and the neuronal circuits throughout the whole depths of the animal brain. And the resolution of the instrument is so good that we see real details of the connectivity, not only the individual cell bodies, but also the dendrites and dendritic spines, which are the places where neurons link to those around them.
“We can also visualize communication between the neurons through some pretty ingenious methods of staining that were developed before. And we can also measure the blood flow, all at a microscopic level.
“And all this information brings clues for understanding, first, the brain functions, where we still have many gaps, but also for studying some serious diseases of the brain, such as dementia, autism or Parkinson's.”
Do you think that in the future, the endoscope could be used for examining the brain of human patients?
“That’s a very common question. Technologically, there is nothing to prevent this, but I would say the question remains whether the utility of that for humans would outweigh or counterbalance the necessary complications.
“The animal models that we use are not just ordinary mice or rats. These are transgenic animals. And in their brains, some carefully selected populations of neurons are labelled fluorescently to sort of stand out from the background. The staining can also tell us something about their states and conditions when being imaged.
“In human patients, such forms of labelling are currently not available and it's even difficult to imagine that it will happen at some point at any point soon. But I don't really see much motivation to involve humans in this research, especially at this level.
“Laboratory animals, including the models of various diseases, provide us with many new and often pretty ground-breaking insights that then leads to developments of drugs and treatments for human patients, so the benefit is already there through the research on animal models.”
What other uses might your endoscope have, be it in medical fields or other industries?
“This is not quite related to what we've been publishing recently, but one of our activities is the development of endoscopes for chemical imaging. And these are primarily designed for human patients in the future.
“With those modalities, we could inspect any suspicious tissues instantly inside the body without the need of extracting biopsies and time consuming histological stating, which is done remotely.
“So far, this technology has been far too slow to be put in practice, but hopefully this may change in the future. So we see a possibility to use this technology in a little bit different modified forms for oncological diagnostics as well.
“But in industrial applications, we can see possibilities of inspection procedures and devices pretty much anywhere where it's difficult to enter the observation site of interest with bulky optics.”
Finally, you have just received the European Microscopy Award. How important is it for you winning this prize? And would you say it can help you in further research?
“I hope so. Currently, one of the most challenging tasks that scientists have to do is securing sufficient funding for the research. Such prizes can help to visualize the group more and give it publicity and sort of bring relevance that the research we do is really valuable and relevant. So I hope that this award will help us particularly there in helping us to secure the funding.”
Professor Tomáš Čižmár leads the group of Complex Photonics at the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Fibre Optics division at Leibnitz Institute of Photonic technology in Jena.
