Chen and Xia Secure Prestigious NIH Common Fund Venture Program Grant to Develop Groundbreaking Noninvasive Deep Tissue Imaging System
UC Irvine Beckman Laser Institute & Medical Clinic’s Drs. Zhongping Chen and Fei Xia have been selected as one of only four national research teams to receive the prestigious National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund Venture Program grant.
Their project, “Breaking the Scattering Barrier: Multimodal Noninvasive Deep Tissue Imaging Using Reflection Matrix Based Wavefront Shaping,” aims to develop revolutionary optical imaging technology capable of seeing deep inside living tissues with unprecedented resolution and depth.
Working in collaboration with Dr. Song Hu of Washington University and Dr. Guifang Li of University of Central Florida, Drs. Chen and Xia are developing a high-speed, multimodal deep tissue imaging system. This innovative system integrates reflection matrix optical coherence tomography (RM-OCT) with wavefront shaping to overcome the fundamental limitations caused by light scattering in biological tissues.
By overcoming the fundamental scattering barrier of light, this technology will enable real-time, noninvasive visualization of dynamic biological processes. This breakthrough has broad applications in neuroscience, cancer research, and cardiovascular disease, and is poised to accelerate the development of new therapeutic approaches.
The NIH Common Fund Venture Program award provides $1.5 million annually over two years, with the potential for milestone-based funding in a third year. This award recognizes the team’s bold approach to creating practical, novel, and transformative technologies that can be rapidly applied in health-relevant applications.
The NIH Common Fund Venture Program specifically supports fast-paced, high-impact research that addresses critical biomedical challenges. The program embraces bold approaches and responds to the shared priorities of NIH Institutes, Centers, and the Office of the Director.
Click here to learn more about the NIH Common Fund Venture Program.
Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute On Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number UG3DA065120. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
