Researchers at Purdue University developed a new type of microscope to determine the safety and efficacy of medication in the body. Their work is published in Optics Express.
"One of the problems with using the available microscopes or optical devices is that they require a point of reference for the scattered light, since the object being viewed is too optically transparent to scatter the light itself," said Garth Simpson, a professor of analytical and physical chemistry in Purdue's College of Science. "We created a unique kind of microscope that stacks the reference object and the one being examined on top of each other with our device, instead of the conventional approach of having them side by side."
The microscope utilizes technology to interfere with light from a sample plane and a featureless reference plane, quantitatively recovering the subtle phase shifts induced by the sample. The work is published in the Feb. 18 edition of Optics Express.
"The microscope we have created would allow for better testing of drugs," Simpson said. "You could use our optical device to study how quickly and safely some of the active ingredients in a particular medication dissolve. They may crystallize so slowly that they pass through the body before dissolving, which significantly lowers their effectiveness."