FLASH: a new fluorescent superhero!
How stable and effective are nanoscale-encapsulated drugs once they enter the complex biological environment?
Nanomedicine aims to develop safer treatments by encapsulating drugs at the nanoscale, but their stability and behaviour in biological environments remain crucial to understand.
FLIM LABS responds to this challenge with Fluorescence Lifetime Analysis (FLA), an approach that measures the time a light-emitting molecule remains excited (lifetime).
This intrinsic property is a robust readout on molecular conformation and environment.
The FLASH project, in collaboration with NEST, uses FLA to analyse nanomedicines quickly, non-invasively and label-free, directly in their solvent, without alteration. The principle is powerful: drugs such as doxorubicin are luminescent and their physical states (free, bound, aggregated) have distinct lifetimes that FLIM LABS technology can separate.
This provides a powerful tool for research (monitoring structure and stability) and pharmaceutical quality control (batch consistency), paving the way for real-time observation of drug release in living systems.