Monday 7 March 2011

Visit by Onofrio Marago

Onofrio Marago (NanoSoft Lab, IPCF-CNR, Messina) is visiting the group this week, 7-11 March 2011.



Onofrio has a long-running collaboration with the UCL Optical Tweezers Group and exchange visits between UCL and NanoSoft Lab are presently funded by our Royal Society International Joint Project.

Left: Onofrio adjusting the evanescent-wave optical binding experiment.

Tuesday 1 March 2011

NPL Annual Review

The NPL-UCL Microbubble Project is featured in the latest NPL Annual Review, 110 Years of Impact.
Measuring with microbubbles
NPL is working with University College London on a fascinating project which investigates the dynamics of microbubbles, to see if they can be used as highly sensitive sensors in medical an industrial applications.
Microbubbles are specially-coated bubbles which are designed primarily to enhance ultrasound pulse-echo imagaing.  Their use significantly enhances sound echoes, thereby improving detection accuracy, and therefore diagnosis of 'difficult' cancers (e.g. liver, prostate).
Microbubbles (and specially designed ultrasonic fields) are being studied worldwide as possible vehicles for drug and gene delivery.  They promise to play a crucial role in fighting Alzheimer's disease, or cancers in which the use of chemotherapy is deemed too risky to the patient, and thus a targeted therapy is more effective.
NPL's work in this area is developing the measurement building blocks, to exploit the sensitivity of microbubbles to local changes in their environment, so extending their effectiveness in medical applications and beyond.

For more information about this project contact Phil Jones at UCL, or Gianluca Memoli at NPL.