Welcome to LAMMP

Program Goals

As a NCRR Biomedical Technology Resource Center, LAMMP is engaged in:

• Core Technology Research and Development
• Collaborative Research and Service
• Training and Dissemination

LAMMP core research emphasizes the devlopment of optical instrumentation and biophysical models of light-tissue interaction. One of the primary goals is to "translate" basic science to clinical medicine. LAMMP core and collaborative research involves studying cellular and molecular function in domains ranging from single cells to human subjects.

Many LAMMP core technologies are "one-of-a-kind" and can be configured for different applications. LAMMP provides both laser microbeam and microscopy technologies (MMT) for optical manipulation and functional imaging of living cells, and laser medical translational technologies (MTT) for monitoring, treating, and imaging pre-clinical animal models and human subjects.

MMT and MTT technologies are linked together by a common set of optical technologies, computational models, data visualization methods, and biomedical applications. Combined, they are capable of characterizing and imaging structure and biochemical composition in tissues with scalable resolution and depth sensitivity ranging from microns to centimeters. This allows selective interrogation of the essential components of tissue: molecules, cells, extracellular matrix, and vasculature. Currently, we apply these emerging methods to biological models and clinical problems in order to characterize and quantify the precise structural and functional origins of intrinsic optical signals. Our goal is to advance these technologies so they become widely-available, enabling methods for solving fundamentally important problems in biology and medicine.