New research collaborations with industry

Robert Prud'homme, professor of chemical and biological engineering, will explore ways to improve nanoparticles for use as drug delivery systems. For effectiveness and safety, nanoparticles must remain in the body long enough to deliver a drug but be cleared out when they are no longer useful. To design and evaluate nanoparticles for medical applications, Prud'homme's lab will work with two start-up companies: Philadelphia-based Optofluidics Inc., which makes a technology known as the "NanoTweezer" that can enable analysis of the surface of a single particle; and Optimeos Life Sciences LLC, which develops nanoparticles for medical imaging and therapeutic purposes.

Kai Li, the Paul M. Wythes '55 P86 and Marcia R. Wythes P86 Professor in Computer Science, and Sebastian Seung, professor of computer science and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, will collaborate with the Intel Corporation to speed up the computation time involved in deep learning, a form of machine learning with the capacity to tackle modeling of the brain and other complex systems. The researchers will design and deploy computer software that can identify structures in high-resolution two-dimensional images, and find neuron structures in three-dimensional images. The technology also will enable the researchers to decode human brain functions by analyzing four-dimensional brain voxel data, or volumes of brain that change over the dimension of time.