ABSTRACTS: 

CNIO: The Brain Metastasis Group (CNIO) has the goal of providing the known-how for applying clinically relevant questions to interrogate experimental and human-derived brain tumors. We are specifically interested in exploiting diagnostic and therapeutic opportunities within Nanobright to challenge the lethality of this unmet clinical need in oncology.

IIT: We will describe recent results and related issues concerning (i) the numerical estimation of the electromagneic field profile along tapered fibers, (ii) the spatial-sective activation of a subset of hotspots on flat-cleaved fibers

CNRS: We will present a technique to design and fabricate ultrahigh trasmission optical nanofibers characterized by a highly confined and intense evanescent field at the nanofiber surface. With this compact optical platform it is possibile to couple light with small structures deposited on the surface, in order to study the interaction between the guided electromagnetic modes and matter.

CSIC: Extracellular mapping of brain metastasis and TBI. We will discuss rhythmopathies accompanying brain metastasis and traumatic brain injury (TBI), and how they can be integrated with multifunctional neural implants for better delination of epileptogenic territories.

ABSTRACT: Raman spectroscopy is a powerful technique to probe the molecular composition of a specimen label-free. The application of Raman spectroscopy to diagnose pathological conditions such as cancer invasion in healthy tissue is receiving increasing attention from the bio-photonics community. This seminar will articulate in two sections. The first section will provide a brief overview on the basic principles of Raman scattering and its applications in neuroscience, with particular attention to endoscopy methods. The second section will present recent results obtained by the NanoBright consortium in the development of a minimally invasive, depth-resolved implantable neural probe for the detection of metastatic formations in deep brain regions. 

ABSTRACT: Upon diagnosis of a brain tumor (primary or secondary) patients face a dismal prognosis. Very aggressive treatments including surgery are frequently applied with palliative rather than curative results since systemic therapies do not reach significant results in the majority of patients. Decreasing the aggressive management by limiting the need of biopsies and facilitating the access of the many drugs that have been proved efficacious against cancer out of the brain might offer new opportunities. Our contribution to Nanobright is intended to apply light using specific probes develop within the consortium to provide clinically relevant applications for these technologies using advanced tumor models as well as human samples.

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ABSTRACT: Plasmonic fiber optics have shown great promise in a wide variety of scientific fields, however they are unable to fully exploit the modal diversity of the waveguide as the input light is scrambled by the coupled system. Here, we show that these difficulties can be overcome by applying wavefront shaping techniques prior to transmission through the fiber to finely tailor the output light to selectively excite either a sub-region of the nanostructures or an entire structure. We demonstrate how a spatially selective SERS signal may be collected through the fiber, paving the way for spatially-resolved plasmonic endoscopes.

ABSTRACT: TBA