Dr. Daniel Heller on Cancer Nanomedicine, Optical Nanosensors, and Explainable AI in Early Diagnostics

It's nice to hear that all the interest in carbon nanotubes sparked practical research like yours.

Could you walk us through nanosensing technology and explain what makes working at the nanoscale so unique and exciting to you?

So there's really an explosion of different methods and technologies to get information out of the body and into potentially a computer or at least to a wearable device to a computer to be able to then use that data and process that data with now such increasingly complex and interesting methods like different forms of AI.

We found that when working on carbon nanotubes, that they really work as a potentially unique form of sensor technology that can transduce information.

Certainly, there are wearable technologies that shine light on the body and use the reflection of that light to measure things like heart rate.

And what we want to do is use nanotechnologies, which are super tiny materials like nanoparticles or carbon nanotubes.

They're so tiny, they get down to about 100,000th of the diameter of a human hair in terms of that size range.

and then use those to pick up information from inside the body, or even just in blood, and get that information to either a wearable, if it's part of a device that could be worn, or just into a computer.

And that information could be very complex or very simple.

It could be, say, one biomarker, one protein level, or it could be Many, many, many events that can be used to understand the state of the body, the state of a disease, whether someone has cancer.

For students specifically interested in microsensing technologies and their incorporation into healthcare, can you elaborate more on the field to help students visualize the range of different subfields and applications that researchers are advancing? And tell us more about your area of research and what the cutting edge of nanosensing looks like to you.

So there's many types of technologies here that kind of fall under these sensor and nano sensor and also kind of nano robot or micro robot types of fields.

And so when kind of coming down from the larger to the smaller, there's many micro technologies that people are working on, which are definitely larger than the things that I work on there, they might be these pill size robots with microprocessors inside of them that are basically like small computer chips.

And so a pill size, say, for instance, a pill size camera that someone wants to ingest in order to do kind of a colonoscopy without having an actual endoscope where people and this has been done and realized.

And or pill sized sensors for there's been pill sized sensors that are kind of similar to these cameras, but maybe can sense different chemicals.

So those are definitely larger than the things that I work on.

But still, they're miniaturization of electronics into something that can be put inside the body.

And certainly things there are also related to things like glucose, you know, monitors that you can put on on the body and and these kind of implantable and some wearable sensors.

And these can be made to be very smart.

You could put maybe almost a whole computer chip onto these things, and they could potentially in the future be used to do things like people want to do robotic surgery using micro robots and things like that.

And those are definitely...

And they can be made very smart because you can put a whole computer on these things.

And I would say that maybe a competing size and similar types of size technologies are things like even engineering bacteria.

So an engineering where you can make bacteria-sized and cell-sized materials very smart.

They can have a nucleus.