Researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will use funding from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to establish a national collaborative Biomedical Technology Research Resource to develop label-free optical imaging technologies for medical and biological applications. Development of the Center for Label-free Imaging and Multi-scale Biophotonics (CLIMB), which is funded by an initial five-year award, was a joint effort between Stephen Boppart, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and bioengineering; Mark Anastasio, a professor of bioengineering; Rohit Bhargava, a professor of bioengineering; and the late Gabriel Popescu, who was a professor of electrical and computer engineering. The center’s primary goal is to create optical and computational imaging technologies that can serve as a resource for clinicians and other investigators in the biological and medical sciences. (From left) Mark Anastasio, a professor of bioengineering; Stephen Boppart, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and bioengineering; and Rohit Bhargava, a professor of bioengineering, will use funding from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the National Institutes of Health to establish the Center for Label-free Imaging and Multi-scale Biophotonics, known as CLIMB. According to project details available via the NIH’s Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools’ Expenditures and Results module, CLIMB will build on recent advancements in interferometric, nonlinear, chemical, and computational imaging at the university. Three Technology Research and Development (TRD) projects will combine expertise in multimodal and nonlinear imaging from the Boppart group; computational imaging from the Anastasio group; and quantitative phase imaging from the Popescu group to translate technology from lab-to-clinic and point-of-care settings. The unifying concept for the technologies developed at CLIMB, according to project details, is the ability to extract quantitative biomarkers from specimens using intrinsic contrast imaging, for example, label-free imaging. “Traditionally, people have used dyes, stains, and labels in microscopy to provide contrast, but those can be toxic and interfere with the cells and the very processes we are investigating,” Boppart said. “The questions arose: ‘What signals can we extract from cells, molecules, and tissues in a label-free manner? What are their inherent optical properties?’ If we can take advantage of that, it can lead to many benefits.” One of those benefits is that technologies developed for label-free microscopy can immediately be incorporated into human studies, allowing researchers to efficiently demonstrate their clinical applications. This is an advantage over the dyes, stains, and optical probes used in traditional imaging applications, which are considered drugs that must be FDA-approved before use with human patients. According to Boppart, the challenge in using biophotonics involves identifying how best to capture new microscopic data, in one small field of view, and then apply it to macro scales in humans. The center’s five-year award is renewable. In the longer term, Boppart said, the group aims to show that its research improved human health, as well as fundamental understanding of biology and disease.