XLIM Research Institute and A*STAR’s Singapore Bioimaging Consortium (SBIC) embarks on four year partnership to optimise imaging technologies for medical diagnostics at the bedside

French research institute XLIM (UMR7252, CNRS/Université de Limoges) and the Singapore Bioimaging Consortium (SBIC), Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore, have signed a 4-year agreement for the creation of an International Research Project (IRP) on 21st October 2020. IRP is part of the toolkit proposed by CNRS for strengthening scientific cooperation with foreign partners. The IRP “FiberMed” (“Specialty optical fiber based biosensing for medical applications”) is an extension of the PICS (in french “Programme International de Coopération Scientifique” - international programme for scientific cooperation) project implemented by the two partners from 2016 to 2018 entitled “Bio-detection platforms based on special optical fibers for clinical diagnostics”, which was dedicated for the development of ultra-sensitive fiber-based Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) biosensing platform.

The FiberMed project aims for associating the complementary and multidisciplinary expertise of SBIC and XLIM, for developing new biosensing techniques and tool prototypes for medical diagnostics at the bedside. The originality of this project lies in exploiting the properties of functionalized special optical fibers to improve the performances of existing biosensing techniques or to develop new techniques. This project is based on XLIM’s expertise in the design and fabrication of novel specialty optical fibers, and on SBIC’s expertise in the development of bio-photonics based biosensing platforms for real-life medical applications with potential for industry tie up and commercialization.

The project is led by Dr Dinish U.S and Prof. Malini Olivo of SBIC Bio-optical Imaging Group and Dr Georges Humbert of XLIM Fiber Photonics team.

For more information about SBIC, visit https://www.a-star.edu.sg/sbic/

For more information about XLIM, visit http://www.xlim.fr/en/laboratory/presentation

For more information about CNRS international toolkit at CNRS, visit https://international.cnrs.fr/en/cooperer-a-l-international/

For more information about FiberMed : https://cnrssingapore.cnrs.fr/project/irp-fibermed/