Photonics Driving Economic Growth in Europe - Photonics21

2. Photonics Research and Innovation Challenges
2.3 Life Science & Health
Main socio-economic challenges addressed
Progress in the field of photonic methods
and techniques for Health and Life Sciences
will contribute significantly to solving several
of the ‘grand challenges’ of our time as de-
fined in the Lund Declaration of July 2009, by
offering “sustainable solutions in areas such
as … water and food, ageing societies, public
health, pandemics …”.
For most European countries, the projected demo-
graphic changes will have drastic consequences for
European citizens and their healthcare systems.
For example, the number of people older than 65
years will double by 2030, leading to a dramatic
growth of age-related diseases including Alzheimer’s
disease, cardiac infarction, stroke, age
related macular degeneration, diabetes, kidney
failure, osteoarthritis, and cancer. Greater mobility
of the population will result in the increased
occurrence of pandemics. Therefore, providing
adequate health care for all European citizens will
require enormous efforts. These challenges can
best be met through breakthroughs in and deployment
of Biophotonic technologies, yielding new
cost-effective methods for improved diagnosis and
therapy. These same technologies can also serve to
control water and food quality, thereby reducing
diseases caused by contamination.
Major photonics needs
A major step towards tackling these challenges will
be to focus Biophotonics research and innovation
on the development of easy-to-access, minimally
invasive, low-cost screening methods. These will
be based on photonics point-of-care methods and
technologies, providing a risk assessment of age
and life-style related diseases (ideally risks factors
for a combination of several diseases would be assessed
simultaneously), thus establishing a reliable
result within minutes.
Detailed investigation, employing more advanced
diagnostic methods to locate and precisely evaluate
the origin of the disease, would then be undertaken
if the screening returned a positive result for one of
the disease parameters. Improved diagnostic and
interventional methods will be developed, based
on improved multi-band (X-ray, Ultraviolet, Visible,
Near/Mid/Far IR, Terahertz) photonics, spectroscopic
and endoscopic devices. These should provide more
reliable and precise examinations than current ‘gold
standard’ methods, without increasing examination
costs or duration. An illustrative example is
provided by the diagnosis of bowel cancer, where
the established procedure (white-light colonoscopy)
is neither precise nor sensitive enough to
detect all cancerous lesions, and is considered too
invasive a screening tool for the majority of the
population. Improved screening should therefore
indicate where further diagnostics was necessary,
and improved diagnostics could precisely locate and
analyse the disease, before therapeutic measures
were initiated. These could incorporate multi-band
photonics techniques to provide safer, personalised
treatment methods, tailored for specific therapy
and treatment monitoring.
In addition to their use for the diagnosis and treatment
of diseases, multi-band photonics methods
could also provide preventative tools, for example,
offering analytical methods to monitor and evalu-
Breakthroughs in and
deployment of Biophotonic
technologies will yield
new cost-effective methods
for improved diagnosis
and therapy.
The trend towards an ageing
society in Europe will increase
over the decades. © Fotolia
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