In the science fiction movie Fantastic Voyage, the PROTEUS is a submarine that is miniaturised with all its crew to “about the size of a microbe” and sent into the body of a scientist to remove a blood clot from his brain. Although miniaturisation of a human body is clearly impossible, the dream of “touching” single cells has...
High-content screening (HCS) is a technology for high-throughput phenotypic analysis of cells which is integrated into all aspects of contemporary drug discovery and development and increasingly attracts attention in cell biology. HCS enables investigating a variety of cell phenotypes including those linked to the cell metabolism. However, despite the growing interest to understand metabolism – in particular as a...
Last decade strong technological effort provided the availability on the market of cheap chips integrating a full 77 GHz radar system, including the RF and the signal processing sections, which potentially offer an infinite variety of applications beyond the original one, i.e., automotive safety and autonomous drive. However an analogous effort on the radar antenna is yet to...
Cancer is the second leading cause for death worldwide. A current trend in medicine demands to develop minimal-invasive optical imaging techniques to visually determine lesion boundaries. If such a device was available, the current 2-step procedure of biopsy and follow-up analysis of stained tissue under the microscope by the pathologist could be replaced by a...
Blood gas measurements are a vital tool in monitoring the health of prematurely born children. About three quarters of all patients in neonatal intensive care units are monitored in this way to prevent morbidity and mortality, particularly from hyperoxia and hypoxia. However, current methods and technology suffer from major problems in both handling and reliability, which in the...
This phase I project scope is to develop the PTMsenseTM , a novel microscale electrochemical biosensor for highly sensitive detection of protein modifications. The biosensor will be further integrated (outside the scope of the phase I project) as the core technology of companion diagnostic kits that will allow matching a drug to a cancer patient in point-of-care settings....
Medical endoscopy is now a common but critical healthcare procedure to look inside, and perform medical procedures in the body. When performing endoscopic surgical procedures in the abdominal cavity (known as laparoscopy) only a small insertion cut needs be made into the abdominal wall. This is known as “key-hole” surgery or minimally invasive surgery. Its...
Europe is investigating the Einstein Telescope to enhance its research infrastructure. Around 2030 this facility should be operational to image the universe with gravitational waves with a ten-fold improved sensitivity compared to current interferometers. To reach this sensitivity one requires seismic sensor networks to subtract noise caused by direct gravitational coupling of mass density fluctuations to suspended components of...
Lighting is present in most indoor areas. Apart from illumination, lighting infrastructure can be used for data communication using Visible Light Communication (VLC) technology. VLC encodes the dta into fast changes on the intensity of the LED light and, at the receiver, these intensity fluctuations are detected using a Photodiode. So far, the presence of opaque objects inside...
There is a growing interest in portable, non-invasive brain monitoring technologies in the field of personalised healthcare. This is well in-line with the needs of the European population for accurate and fast neurological diagnostics and targeted treatment. As an example, there are 6 million people in Europe who suffer from epilepsy. In most hospital units,...
Project ThermoQuant will develop innovative, high-performance sensors for nanoscale thermal sensing and imaging. The ultimate goal is a breakthrough in nanoscale thermal sensing and a thermal imaging technology with sensitivities in the K/Hz½-range and spatial resolutions down to 10 nm. For this, the consortium partners will explore solid-state electronic spins in diamond as nanoscale temperature sensors. The accuracy targeted...
With PHIL we are proposing to design, build and evaluate a system for liquid biopsy (LB). Liquid biopsy, or the capacity to noninvasively isolate and analyse plasma tumour DNA (ptDNA) in blood samples, represents an important tool for modern oncology that enables increasingly safe, personalised, and robust cancer diagnosis and treatment. However, the very low concentration of ptDNA...
Advances in infrared photodetector based instrumentation technologies present significant development opportunities across a broad range of industries and applications. From security, health care and biosensing, to food plan analysis, geospatial mapping, petroleum exploration and intelligent transport, infrared photodetectors are the core components of modern light detecting instrumentation and play a key role in all the above applications. Despite...
We propose an opto-mechanical accelerometer working at the precision-limits imposed by quantum mechanics. Our chip-based approach combines our state-of-the-art designs in both nanophotonics and quantum phononics to pioneer new types of telecom sensors which are quickly becoming widespread in modern society. Using techniques recently developed at TU Delft we are now able to manipulate highstress films with unique optical...
Glioblastoma (GB) is the major aggressive primary brain tumour in adults showing disproportion between high mortality compared to low overall incidence. Survival after detection is below 18 months even after standard aggressive treatment and no cure has been reported. Novel therapies (e.g. immunotherapy) may be very expensive and it may be relevant to have in...
