The Increasing Relevance of FTIR Spectroscopy in Biomedicine

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Research into the utilization of FTIR based spectroscopic methods has been going on for close to about 25 years with the field expanding from the initial days of cancer diagnosis to now where it includes various diseases occurring due to pathogens, genetic and environmental factors as well as lifestyle and age related factors. In parallel there have been developments in terms of both instrumentation sophistication and computational methods, to make it more clinically appealing while increasing the sensitivity and specificity of the technique. As the field has diversified over the years, a few reports are highlighted that establish the growing acceptance of FTIR spectroscopy as a reliable technique in both basic and applied research in the field of biomedicine.Though the field began with studies on cancerous tissues which were used as samples in the initial period owing to their well defined architecture it has since expanded to other types of tissue abnormalities and utilization of animal models. Malignant tissues, melanoma and other types of abnormal tissues have been used for an altogether different purpose, namely as model systems for development of computational methods to analyze the data to increase the specificity and sensitivity of the technology. This is one aspect of the technology that has been steadily progressing with the interdisciplinary research and software development. The ability to develop instrumentation that can monitor molecular changes without staining continuously is an important advance in the field of IR based diagnosis. The recent work of Gelfand et al. establish that it is feasible to measure changes over time in vitro without the need for the procedures followed hitherto like fixing and drying to get rid of excess water while performing FTIR spectroscopy. This study highlights not only the ability of FTIR spectroscopy to continuously monitor changes in cells under in vitro conditions but provides a platform to employ the system for screening of drugs in the initial stages of a trial. This study brings into focus the expansion of FTIR vibrational spectroscopy into animal model based studies in the field of biomedicine. While the field was largely limited to studies of human tissue with a view to establish its relevance to the clinical applications in the former decades, recent work as this further decrease the gap between the basic and translational research requiring FTIR spectroscopy. We predict that with the requirement for easier techniques that are cheap and rapid, having high sensitivity and specificity to unambiguously diagnose a disease, and due to a growing population, there would be further expansion of the research into the utilization of FTIR based technologies in biomedicine. As technology advances and data analysis and interpretation take on a more objective approach, it is very likely that the technique will become more common and be routinely used for both applied research and basic research. The latest approaches to FTIR based research point in this direction

With Warm Regards,
Sara Giselle
Associate Managing Editor
Journal of Medical Physics and Applied Scinces