News
Two ERC Advanced Grants awarded to our institute
We are pleased to announce the two ERC grants, a prestigious and highly endowed research grant scheme from the EU for excellent scientists who want to carry out groundbreaking and high-risk projects.
SOFT
Monika Ritsch-Marte
Organoids are key models for personalized medicine – but looking inside is difficult because they greatly attenuate light. In the ERC project SOFT, we are developing a non-contact, acoustofluidic tool that compresses organoids in a defined manner with ultrasonic forces and at the same time enables optical 3D tomography. For the first time, we can simultaneously reconstruct the optical and elastic (mechanical) properties of an organoid. As we have known for some time, mechanics is central to functional understanding: from the correct differentiation into organ-like structures and early steps in tumorigenesis to the differentiation of healthy and diseased cells – including insight into vascular growth, one of the great challenges of organoid technology.
DeepVibes
Alexander Jesacher
The “DeepVibes” project aims to use light microscopes to peer much deeper into biological tissue than has previously been possible. To this end, a novel form of adaptive optics is being developed which adapts the laser beams to the local tissue structures in milliseconds whilst images are being captured, thereby reducing aberrations and light scattering. This technology is combined with a chemically specific microscopy method that can make fats, proteins or DNA directly visible without the need for dyes or other markers. In the long term, DeepVibes could open up new possibilities for medical diagnostics as well as for basic biological research.
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Medizinische Universität Innsbruck (german)
New Phd-program
