On the 11th of January 2022, the inauguration ceremony of the Incubator House in the Szeged Science Park took place. The building, which is located next to the ELI-ALPS Laser Research Centre in the Science Park, has been renovated and is now the headquarters of the Hungarian Molecular Medicine Centre of Excellence. Representatives of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory also attended the inauguration of the incubator. The Center for Molecular Fingerprinting, as a National Laboratory for Life Sciences Research, was represented by Dr. László Sándor Vastag, our Managing Director.

The ceremony included attendees such as Edith Heard, Director General of EMBL, Plamena Markova, Head of International Relations, and Vladimir Benes, Head of the Genomics Core Facility. The EMBL delegation was joined by Prof. Dr. László Palkovics, the Hungarian Minister for Innovation and Technology, Dr. Christoph Sensen, Director General of the HCEMM, and István Szabó Ph.D., Vice President for Science and International Affairs.

Scientific partnerships and knowledge sharing mark the beginning of an exciting period, especially as EMBL will start its new 5-year scientific program on the 1st of January 2022.

Prof. Edith Heard, Director General of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), said: 'The new program has an ambitious goal: to usher in a new era of life sciences in Europe. Achieving a complete understanding from molecules to entire ecosystems. The focus of research is human health. "We hope that the project will also help to address major societal challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and emerging infectious diseases and cancers. The Programme will integrate life sciences research in the Member States and help them achieve a socio-economic green recovery. The scientific challenges we will address - and the major societal issues we will address - cannot be tackled by any country or discipline alone. The aim of this program is for EMBL to engage with its member countries in an unprecedented way over the next 5 years".

EMBL's network provides a unique opportunity to put European expertise in Hungarian life sciences research into practice. HCEMM, as part of the National Laboratories Programme, brings together the best skills and strengths of Hungarian researchers. The new base in Szeged will help the HCEMM become a regional scientific center for cutting-edge molecular medicine, training, and employment of highly qualified researchers.

"The mission of HCEMM is to carry out research and development on Healthy Ageing based on four pillars: cancer research, metabolic diseases, cardiovascular diseases and infectious diseases. The aim is to develop new diagnostic methods and treatment options that will improve quality of life while reducing healthcare costs. The furnishing of the laboratories and offices will also start within days," said Dr. Christoph Sensen, Director General of the HCEMM.

Our research institute has started discussions with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory to identify possible areas of future collaboration.

The cmf research team welcomes Dionysios Potamianos. He just finished his Phd work in Prof. Reinhard Kienberger´s group at the Technical University Munich on femtosecond and attosecond electron dynamics of semiconductor systems. He joined our team as a laser engineer with the focus on infrared fingerprinting technology. He will help us develop the next-generation instruments for human blood measurements based on a new ultra-stable diode-pumped Cr:ZnS laser platform.

CMF's goal is to develop new laser-based tools for monitoring human health in a new way, not possible before.

How? By analyzing blood samples in an innovative process using ultrashort laser flashes.

By joining CMF’s group and supporting our research program you can make an important and far-sighted contribution to our population and hopefully you can help to detect severe diseases at an early stage in the future, so that optimal therapy may become possible before the disease can fully develop!

Have a look at our positions and contact Eszter Márton Szűcs on MUK HR Department if you have any other questions!

1. Laboratory Manager
2. Laboratory Associate
3. Head of Laser Laboratory/Senior Laser Scientist
4. Laser Technician

Join us in shaping the future of healthcare!

CMF’s promising molecular fingerprint methodology gets separate chapter in Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ)’s Attoworld image movie, filmed on 19th October 2021.

One of the CMF’s main research partner institution: MPQ’s Attoworld group – led by Prof. Dr. Ferenc Krausz – gives home to explore and exploit electron-light interactions as they occur in real-time. Our vision together is creating a breakthrough in the current health monitoring system and shaping the future of healthcare.

The MPQ image film shooting started with an interview with Prof. Dr. Ferenc Krausz (Scientific Director of CMF), in which he answered questions about the scientific content and application areas of attosecond research and talked about motivations and visions. They captured MPQ lab scientists’ daily work, and in the afternoon, they visited the Biolabs and the Lex laboratories, where the science teams develop the new approach of Infrared Molecular Fingerprinting in cooperation with CMF.

Cancers can grow in numerous places within our bodies and present tremendous threat to our health. But if one could spot cancerous growth early on, the chances to win over it would be higher. Are there ways of achieving this? The team closely collaborating with the Center for Molecular Fingerprinting Research (CMF) from the Laser Physics departments of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) in Munich revealed that infrared spectroscopic profiling can be used to pick up molecular traces that solid tumors leave in our bloodstream.

Detecting early and less aggressive cancerous lesions is paramount for having valid medical-treatment options. Besides radiographic tools to visualize tumor tissues within our body, and beyond cutting out tissue biopsies from inner organs for inspection under the microscope, modern diagnostic approaches often focus on non-invasive cancer detection: They analyze bodily fluids and try to capture macroscopically “invisible” molecular changes caused by cancer. In fact, tumors disseminate many aberrant metabolic products and signaling molecules into their surroundings. Likewise, tumors also characteristically interact with adjacent normal cells of a tissue, and later on with our immune cells and blood vessels. These interactions substantially affect the type and amount of many molecules that end up circulating in our bloodstream, even at a time when a tumor is still confined to an organ and not yet metastasizing. However, unambiguously identifying molecules that signify cancer – the holy grail for medical diagnostics and pharma – remains a challenge!

Substantial efforts have been made by the Attoworld research team at the LMU Munich in paving new technological avenues for the most reliable and sensitive detection of molecules in complex liquid matrices. In this context, the BIRD research team (https://www.attoworld.de/bird.html) just published a paper in eLife ( DOI: 10.7554/eLife.68758 ) where they flowed a tiny volume of a blood sample through a cuvette, shined infrared light through it, and quantified the complex changes in the light-wave patterns coming from the blood sample as a function of the identity and number of the hundreds of thousands of different molecules dissolved therein. Extracting information by using machine learning algorithms allows determining a signature that is so highly characteristic of an individual’s blood sample that the signature can be referred to as a “molecular fingerprint”. The BIRD team’s earlier work already showed that such infrared molecular fingerprints were highly reproducible over repeated blood draws from an individual (Huber et al., Nat. Communications 2021, PMCID: PMC7940620).

The size of the problem in tracing disease like cancer by infrared molecular fingerprinting now becomes immediately obvious: One has to move to the population level and explore hundreds of individuals to be in the position to extract the difference between the average healthy fingerprint and the average disease fingerprint. How does it work in real life? In collaboration with medical doctors from LMU clinics, the BIRD team set up a matched case-control clinical study and performed comparative infrared molecular fingerprinting on samples from patients with independently diagnosed lung, prostate, breast, or bladder carcinomas. And indeed, infrared fingerprinting of blood was surprisingly robust and correctly detected the cancer state. Excitingly, infrared fingerprints could be utilized, not only for detecting cancer but also for distinguishing between different cancer types, indicating that each had triggered specific molecular alterations.

Could the approach move into the clinics one day? While still far from being a method that patients can benefit from in medical clinics, the published study substantiates the expectation that, in the future, infrared fingerprinting may become useful for aiding cancer diagnosis or even for cancer screening of low-grade cancers that would go unnoticed using current cancer tests. In particular, infrared fingerprinting may be propelled to yet another level soon. Especially when ultrafast light sources and high-precision electric-field-based metrologies from the Attoworld’s research will come into play.

The path can be seen, and the quest continues.

With their Research Article published in “Angewandte Chemie Int. Ed.”, Liudmila Voronina, Mihaela Žigman et al. made it on the cover of the 2021-60/31 June 2021 issue. The picture shows a snapshot of blood serum composition that reflects the health state of an individual. It can be obtained using infrared spectroscopy in a simple and inexpensive manner, but the molecular nature of the disease-related changes therein remains poorly understood. In their article the researchers report using proteomics to reveal a set of proteins that contribute the most to infrared absorption of blood serum and show that they create a distinct signature of lung cancer. The cover image was designed by the corresponding authors and created by Dennis Luck.

Original publication:
Molecular Origin of Blood-Based Infrared Spectroscopic Fingerprints
L. Voronina, C. Leonardo, J. Mueller-Reif, P. Geyer, M. Huber, M. Trubetskov, K. Kepesidis, J. Behr, M. Mann, F. Krausz, M. Žigman
Angewandte Chemie 60, 17060 (2021)

The “Center for Molecular Fingerprinting” (CMF) in Hungary has achieved another milestone and collected its first blood samples for its future research in health monitoring in the course of the medical study “Health for Hungary” (H4H).

The future of healthcare is at a turning point - modern diagnostic techniques are moving towards a preventive and personalized diagnostic approach, rather than a treatment-after-detection used this far. The overriding aim at CMF is thus to detect severe health conditions and diseases well before symptoms develop - to be able to treat them better. Analysis of the composition of blood samples with ultrashort laser pulses could provide the opportunity for personalised health monitoring by repeated sampling of the same person over time. And this is where “Center for Molecular Fingerprinting“ (CMF) steps in:

July 27th, 2021, marked an important milestone for the research activities of the CMF in Hungary. As part of the "Health4Hungary" (H4H) study, that is aimed to establish infrared fingerprinting for health monitoring, the first blood samples for innovative early detection of diseases were successfully collected for CMF in a first kick-off: The doors for this nation-wide research program just opened at the end of July at the medical cooperation partner “Vita Verum Medical Bt.” (at Székesfehérvár near Budapest), being the initial site in a series of further ones to be joining soon.

After intensive training of the medical staff and coaching regarding the data protection guidelines by the CMF team, the first volunteers were welcomed for blood collection. The H4H took off is the tipping point for the large study to happen across Hungary!

What is this research and study good for? CMF's goal is to develop new laser-based tools for monitoring human health in a new way, not possible before. How? By analyzing blood samples in an innovative process using ultrashort laser flashes. This unique and complex technique has its origin in the attoworld research group of Prof. Ferenc Krausz in Munich. The application of how to use these laser pulses to probe human health was established within the team around Dr. Mihaela Zigman and will be further developed in collaboration with CMF. The goal of the H4H program is to recruit individuals as volunteers from broad segments of the Hungarian population - to facilitate the development of this research and to finally develop a new possibility to track and monitor development of diseases.

The project is planned for several years and aimed at involving 10,000+ individuals at numerous sites across Hungary. The multiple medical centers over the country will not only provide convenient access for anyone wishing to participate. They also ensure that samples are taken from different geographical areas of Hungary to ideally cover a broad spectrum of the Hungarian population.

After data collection and blood sampling, the tubes are pseudonymously transmitted to the research group. In this way, it is not possible for the researchers to personally identify the test person due to data protection regulations. In the next step, the blood samples are stored under special cooling conditions for laser-based data analysis and subsequently evaluated. During the blood donation for research purposes an additional tube is obtained, providing the volunteer with regular lab results, not only blood count but also blood chemistry results.

Furthermore, contributing to this research program will be making an immensely important and far-sighted contribution for our population and our relatives, our children, and our grandchildren, which will hopefully all help to detect severe diseases at an early stage in the future, so that optimal therapy may become possible before the disease can fully develop!

The core technology at CMF for detecting diseases by their molecular fingerprints in a blood sample is field-resolved infrared spectroscopy. It relies on the generation of extremely short infrared pulses by nonlinear laser technology to excite the molecules in the sample, followed by recording the ringing of the molecular response. The sensitivity for disease detection depends on the brightness of the infrared laser pulses and their spectral information content, i.e., on how many different molecular vibrations the infrared pulses can excite simultaneously. Scaling the brightness and spectral content currently requires an ever increasing in complexity and size of the laser systems. In addition, conventional scaling approaches ultimately reach the fundamental limits of the involved conversion processes.

In a collaboration between the CMF, the LMU Munich, and the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics Dr. Shizhen Qu, Dr. Kafai Mak, Dr. Alexander Weigel, and Prof. Ferenc Krausz have now proposed the elegant solution to amplify the infrared pulses with quantum cascade lasers (QCLs). QCLs are compact on-the-chip laser devices, which can reach Watt-scale infrared optical output with direct electrical power supply – much more than typically achievable with nonlinear techniques. The core of the invention is to send the ultrashort infrared pulses into a combination of QCLs to boost them to previously unachievable power levels. Conveniently, the emission characteristics of QCLs can be tailored by their semiconductor layer structure to specifically amplify spectral components that excite characteristic fingerprint signatures in the blood samples. By selectively enhancing only those parts of the pulse that contribute to the disease-specific fingerprint signatures with a combination of QCLs we expect to reach new levels of sensitivity. With appropriate timing, also amplification of the pure molecular fingerprint signal itself is conceivable.

This first joint patent application witnesses the successful collaboration of the three institutions on the way towards highly sensitive blood-based disease detection and health monitoring.

Thousands of researchers are seeking ways to capture human health within a simple probe. Why? Every person is unique – in the personality as well as in terms of health. And the task of defining the healthy state at a populational level is just colossal. In the face of this, it is crucial to detect aberrations in health as soon as only possible, raising the alarm that a disease is sneaking into one’s body. Many diseases could be better coped with if we were alarmed earlier, as they only start developing. Especially cancer. This is where less invasive ways of disease detection come into play.

In a very inter-disciplinary team at the laser physics department of the LMU Munich, we believe to have made a step in this direction: We analyzed a fluid that connects all the organs – blood. The idea is familiar to anyone from medical check-ups, and it has recently been used for profiling with modern omics techniques. In our case, however, we exposed tiny amounts of blood to infrared light and captured the vibrations originating from the soluble biomolecules. In collaborative work with medical doctors from the LMU Comprehensive Pneumology Center, we set up a proof-of-principle clinical study to collect blood of individuals that were definitely known to have lung cancer, and in parallel from generally healthy, comparable individuals. We measured their blood samples with infrared spectroscopy. And finally - with quite high certainty - we succeeded to tell apart whether a person had lung cancer or not. From a mere drop of blood.

Eureka? Well, we want to go even further. While infrared fingerprints may distinguish lung cancer, they do not yet inform us about the individual blood components that make up the difference. Nevertheless, it would be good to know their identity to be able to further improve the method. This is what we demonstrated in a new study just published in Angewandte Chemie (DOI: 10.1002/anie.202103272). It is all about a combination of two techniques that are usually applied separately: mass spectrometry and infrared spectroscopy. The aim was to decode the actual chemical changes behind the previously “black box” infrared fingerprints of lung cancer. Now, with mass spectrometry of blood samples performed at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich, we identified a set of 12 proteins that account for the spectral signature of lung cancer, where early diagnostic markers are currently missing. All of these proteins were known since a long time. Now - like old dogs playing new tricks - the combinatorial protein signature that we defined turns a new page in diagnostic efforts. And this signature can be measured in a matter of minutes using infrared light!

So are we now one step closer to capturing disease and defining health? Certainly so. Especially as laser scientists at our department are engineering new ways of delivering ever shorter and more precise pulses of light for spectroscopic investigations. Metaphorically, this is like a magnifying lens that allows us to inspect the molecular zoo in our blood at once – in a snapshot. Finally, the results are of broader relevance for many disciplines, as one may generalize our findings to detection of other diseases that leave their traces in blood.

Yet, while we are working on new advances in capturing human health by shining light through drops of blood, we are bearing in mind the notion of Isaak Newton: “What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.”.

Mihaela Zigman

Original article:
Angew Chem Int Ed Engl
Molecular Origin of Blood-based Infrared Spctroscopic Fingerprints
Liudmila Voronina, Cristina Leonardo, Johannes B Mueller-Reif, Philipp E Geyer, Marinus Huber, Michael Trubetskov, Kosmas V Kepesidis, Jürgen Behr, Matthias Mann, Krausz Ferenc, Mihaela Žigman
PMID: 33881784

DOI: 10.1002 / anie.202103272
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.202103272
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ange.202107126

After a very long pause due to the pandemic, the chance to listen to a lecture and talk to Ferenc Krausz in person took place just on May 28th in Vienna. It was a special occasion. Not only in a city significant for attoscience but also special to the Hungarian-Austrian scientist Ferenc Krausz who worked there over many years. The Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) held its Ceremonial Congress of 2021 with renowned scientists lead by Anton Zeilinger, president of the OeAW, as well as Austrian president Alexander Van der Bellen, welcoming Ferenc Krausz as the keynote speaker.

Anyone that would like to watch the ceremonial presentation, seeing the results of Ferenc Krausz and his team from the CMF, LMU and MPQ, here you get the chance to see the video: https://youtu.be/4dQn4fe33hc

In a wake of this impulsive lecture, the main Austrian broadcasting house (ORF) held an interview with Ferenc Krausz. And right here you have the chance to listen and read on the interview with journalist Robert Czepel and learn about what happened in the cellar laboratory of the TU Vienna about two decades ago: https://science.orf.at/stories/3206849/

A new study carried out by a team of laser physicists, molecular biologists and physicians based at LMU Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics has confirmed the temporal stability of the molecular composition of blood in a population of healthy individuals. The data provide a basis for a new method of monitoring the constituents of blood and detecting alterations that reveal changes in a person’s state of health.

The molecular composition of the blood provides information regarding one’s state of health, and may be compared to an individual fingerprint. In principle, changes in the constituents of blood can serve as early signs of disease. However, before chemical fingerprints can be utilized for diagnostic purposes, the stability of the molecular patterns in healthy persons over time must be firmly established. Researchers under the direction of Dr. Mihaela Žigman, Head of the Broadband Infrared Diagnostics (BIRD) group in the Department of Laser Physics led by Prof. Ferenc Krausz at LMU Munich, in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Nadia Harbeck at the LMU Medical Centre, have now successfully accomplished this task. With the aid of a method known as Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), the team has shown that the molecular composition of blood samples obtained from a cohort of healthy donors remains stable over a period of several months, and confirmed that each of the resulting spectra could be clearly assigned to an individual person.

Rapid diagnosis of human diseases is a long standing problem in medicine. As diseases often alter the molecular make-up of circulating body fluids, obtaining a snapshot of their molecular composition would be invaluable in detecting a multitude of diseased states, and the types and concentrations of the many molecules found in the bloodstream can provide vital information on a person’s health. The real challenge, however, comes when one tries to determine the exact composition of body fluids, given that the concentrations of informative molecules are often extremely low. The interdisciplinary BIRD team led by Dr. Mihaela Žigman in Prof. Dr. Ferenc Krausz’s department at LMU, in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Nadia Harbeck at the LMU Medical Centre, has now investigated the stability of the chemical make-up of blood samples over days, weeks and even months.
Based on Fourier-transform infrared measurements (FTIR), the researchers analysed the molecular fingerprints of serum and plasma samples obtained from 31 healthy individuals over the clinically relevant period of 6 months. The study demonstrated that the infrared molecular fingerprint of each individual donor in fact remained stable over periods ranging from a few days to weeks and months, and each temporal profile could be readily attributed to the participant concerned.
“This newly revealed temporal stability of blood-based infrared fingerprints provides a basis for future applications of minimally invasive infrared spectroscopy as a reliable method for the future of health monitoring,” says Mihaela Žigman, leader of the research group.
Standard Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, which uses conventional light sources, could soon be replaced by chemical analyses based on infrared lasers. Given the much higher intensity of laser light, the latter method should be more sensitive and precise, and should therefore yield more detailed and informative characterizations of the molecular constituents of blood. The physicists in the attoworld team, led by Prof. Ferenc Krausz, are now working on the laser technologies necessary to achieve this aim. Exposure to intense infrared light causes molecules to vibrate and emit light at specific frequencies, which depend on the chemical structures of the molecules within the sample. Analysis of the components of the resulting spectrum of electromagnetic oscillations enables researchers to assign them to the many types of molecules present in body fluids. As Prof. Krausz and colleagues reported last year, the new method allows minuscule amounts of different classes of molecules to be spectroscopically detected (Nature, 2. January 2020; doi 10.1038/s41586-019-1850-7).
“With our lasers, we can already detect electrical signals emitted by excited molecules with very high sensitivity,” Ferenc Krausz explains. “Such precise measurements of alterations in the molecular composition of body fluids, together with knowledge of the stable molecular fingerprint of healthy controls, opens up new analytical opportunities in biology and medicine,” says Marinus Huber, leading author of the study. “Our results reveal that it is possible to obtain informative, blood-based infrared fingerprints efficiently, repeatedly and in a minimally invasive manner. The key, in this case, is that the analysis ought to be sensitive enough and sufficiently broad to cover a wide range of possible molecules (or types of molecules) - to be in position to monitor personal health and detect disorders at an early stage. Practically speaking, following-up a person’s health status regularly might become paramount for timely-detecting relevant deviations. In addition to its uses in the fields of health monitoring and preventive medicine, systems biology shall also benefit from the availability of the approach,” Mihaela Žigman adds.
-Thorsten Naeser

Original Publication:
Huber, M., Kepesidis, K.V., Voronina, L. et al. Stability of person-specific blood-based infrared molecular fingerprints opens up prospects for health monitoring. Nat Commun 12, 1511 (2021).

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21668-5
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21668-5
Further information is available from:
Dr. Mihaela Žigman
Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich
Am Coulombwall 1
85748 Garching, Germany.
E-Mail: zigman@mukkozpont.hu.

When it comes to disease detection and health monitoring with field-resolved molecular fingerprinting, turning our vision into reality requires dedicated technological development at the forefront of our scientific research. It starts from the development of new mid-infrared laser sources via advancing sample handling and detection technologies and goes toward finding optimal data acquisition and processing strategies. Over the last couple of months, a new team has formed at CMF with the particular goal to tackle these technical and scientific challenges. In close collaboration, the CMF laser development and technology team in Garching (Germany) is joining forces with LMU laser scientists to combine all technological advances in a one of a kind prototype device for molecular fingerprinting. Once the laser laboratory of CMF will open its gates in Budapest, this instrument will be fundamental to be used in blood sample analysis. Currently, the CMF team headed by Dr. Alexander Weigel is moving frontiers in laser development and solving experimental challenges towards that end.

We would like to wish a warm welcome to a new colleague: Since October 2020, the research group around Dr. Mihaela Žigman has been supported by Viola Zóka, a new medical-technical assistant!

The young Hungarian completed Bachelor of Science in Chemistry. She had developed her passion for chemistry early on and intensified it by her professional experience in a laboratory in Nagykanizsa, Hidrofilt Ltd. Hungary, where she performed analytical chemistry of water samples. When Viola heard about newly developing infrared molecular fingerprinting to analyze way more complex human blood samples that she was used to, she applied for a job at the Center for Molecular Fingerprinting (CMF). CMF is strongly collaborating with the Laser Physics department of the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) Munich and prior to having its own laboratories built and established in Hungary, the samples from the clinical studies lead by CMF will be analyzed at the LMU. And Viola made a move from Hungary to Germany to start her new professional life at the Garching Research Center and directly fuel the CMF research goals from there. Together with laser scientist and molecular biologists, Viola will analyze blood samples for their molecular composition using infrared spectroscopy - something that everyone is very much excited about!

CMF’s strategic partner, the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) in Munich, Germany, just installed an automated biobanking system for sample storage at temperatures below minus 150°C. What is this good for? Under these very low temperatures - so called “cryogenic” conditions in the atmosphere above liquid nitrogen - human samples, such as blood plasma or actually any biological tissues, can be kept for several years, decades without sample deterioration. It assures that valuable human materials collected in frame of clinical studies can be used in long term and thus enables researchers to analyze these with molecular fingerprinting techniques most efficiently. Such an automated cryogenic system is made of large tightly sealed tank that is capable to store up to 60,000 samples. The system is further equipped with a robotic arm that can pick individual tubes automatically, such that the samples are kept and handled well below minus 100 °C at all times.

This installation has a direct impact for the future of the joint CMF-LMU research aims. On the one hand the two institutions will be conducting joint clinical studies. On the other, LMU biobanking system also serves as a test case for the CMF’s envisioned own biorepository, to be established in Budapest.

Thus, CMF is getting familiar with the best way to store most valuable biological materials for the years of research to come!

In cooperation between the Laboratory of Attosecond Physics at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the Centre for Advanced Laser Applications of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, the King Saud University Riad and the Center for Molecular Fingerprinting (Budapest, Hungary), we have developed a molecular spectroscopy technique that overcomes long-standing limitations of traditional techniques, like Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, as described in our recent publication. A powerful femtosecond laser delivers 28 million pulses per second, with highly repeatable waveforms, comprising merely a few infrared-electric-field oscillations. Transmitting these pulses through a complex, molecular sample synchronously excites infrared-active vibrations of molecular bonds, each at its own eigenfrequency. The signals emitted by the vibrationally-excited molecules in the wake of the impulsive excitation coherently add up to a ‘molecular fingerprint’ characteristic of the sample’s molecular composition.

In contrast to traditional spectroscopies, where the entire response of the sample to an infrared excitation hits the detector(s), in field-resolved spectroscopy sub-optical-cycle portions of the time-domain fingerprint field are sequentially carved out by means of nonlinear optics. This dramatically reduces any infrared background on the measured signals, including the noise originating from the excitation and thermal background. This conceptional advance results in an unprecedented detection sensitivity and dynamic range.

We have also demonstrated first biological applications that have so far been beyond the reach of infrared vibrational spectroscopies. These applications include first high-signal-to-noise ratio infrared transmission measurements of living biological tissue and fingerprinting of liquid biopsies with sub-µg/ml sensitivity. Thus, field-resolved spectroscopy promises improved molecular sensitivity and molecular coverage for probing complex, real-world biological and medical settings.

Prof. Ferenc Krausz has recieved the honorary membership of the Roland Eötvös Physical Society, Budapest. After receiving the membership the laser physicist of the Ludwig-Maximilians University München and the Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics held an lecture about how attosecond science technologies can in the future contribute to a new way of finding molecules in human biofluids like blood. This may path the way for medical applications to detect diseases by analyzing so called molecular fingerprints with the help of strong laser light pulses.