Towards novel optical tools for Neuroscience

Personalized and more focused healthcare technologies are being addressed, contributing to the development of micro optical tools for stimulating single-cells/cellular pathways in humans. Optogenetics and the development of optical tweezers for cell-specific stimulation and manipulation could enable more personalized therapies for chronic diseases such as Parkinson (PD), Alzheimer diseases (AD) or Epilepsy. Achievements such as single-cell imaging and manipulation are being reached, due to Biophotonics, enabling microstructures manipulation through strongly confined optical fields. Beginning at the microscale, we intend to understand, using those optical tools, the influence of endosomes/mitochondrial traffic and proteins misfolding processes in neurodegenerative diseases such as PD/AD/Familial Amyloid Polyneuropathy (FAP), and research possible methods to revert abnormal processes (e.g. protein misfolding). If possible, we will translate outcomes to the macrolevel, trying to inhibit seizures in kindling/Epilepsy-rodent models and create an alternative actuator system to DBS, for reverting motor symptoms in PD-rodent models.

Publications:

Computational modeling of red blood cells trapping using Optical Fiber Tweezers – http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7889447/ Paiva, J.S., Ribeiro, R.S.R, Rosa, C.C., Jorge, P.A.S., Cunha, J.P.S. (2017) In Bioengineering (ENBENG), 2017 IEEE 5th Portuguese Meeting on. Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC).