UNM Assistant Professor, Victor Acosta has just received the, NIH NIBIB Trailblazer Early Career Investigator Award. The Trailblazer Award is an opportunity for new and early stage investigators to pursue research programs of high interest to the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) that integrate engineering and the physical sciences with the life and behavioral sciences. His research project is titled, “Single-cell magnetic microscopy with multicolor superparamagnetic probes". 

Noninvasive detection of circulating tumor cells and small tumors is a longstanding challenge in cancer diagnostics. ​In the proposed research, Acosta and his team of researchers will develop a new type of microscope, based on magneto-fluorescent diamond films, to detect cells labeled with highly uniform magnetic nanoparticles sorted into different “colors” based on their magnetic relaxation. The platform will be used to image the distribution of magnetic nanoparticles in cancer cells and detect individual cells flowing through a millimeter-thick tissue phantom. In addition to PI Acosta, research assistant professor, Abdelghani Laraoui, and graduate students, Nate Ristoff and Nazanin Mosavian, will work on the project in collaboration with Dale Huber (CINT) and Helen Hathaway (UNM Cell Biology).