RIYADH: Researchers in the field of laser physics in the Attosecond Sciences Laboratory of the College of Science at King Saud University (KSU) are working on the research project Lasers4Life (L4L) to find a new way to measure biomarkers using innovative femtosecond laser technologies.
The joint research was conducted in cooperation with the Ludwig Maximilian University and Max-Planck-Institute for Quantum Optics in Germany. It was carried out under the leadership of Professor Lawrence Krauss and his team, in cooperation with oncology professors Dr. Khaled Al-Saleh and Jean-Marc Nabholtz of the Oncology Center at the King Saud University Medical City.
Dr. Abdullah bin Mohammed Al-Zeer, member of the research team, said: “The L4L project will influence the future of detecting cancer and other diseases as well as discovering new indicators. An extensive clinical trial is currently underway to test this technology in many medical centers in the Kingdom and around the world.”
Al-Zeer added that the project aims to investigate the feasibility of advanced high-speed laser technologies along with spectroscopy in creating new effective methods to detect and monitor cancer and tumors at an early stage using artificial intelligence statistics (in cooperation with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology).
The idea for the project came to a team of physicists from the Oncology Center at KSU and Max-Planck-Institute for Quantum Optics in 2013. They sought to study the possibility of applying an attosecond laser (one-billionth of one-billionth of a second) to detect cancerous tumors at an early stage.
“If cancer is detected at an early stage, it can be controlled,” Al-Zeer said. “Therefore, a new method was found by drawing blood from the patient and tracking the movement of particles inside the blood to know whether the patient is likely to be affected by cancer.”
The preliminary results of the research program for molecular fingerprinting to substantiate the principle using the quantitative optics technology applied in the detection of breast cancer were published in the Janaury 2020 issue of Nature magazine. The principle was also presented during the ESMO World Congress in Barcelona, Spain and published in the Annals of Oncology journal.
