A team of 18 European partners, including TOPTICA (Germany), Time Bandwidth AG (Switzerland), MMI AG (Germany), M-Squared Lasers (UK), and multinationals Phillips (Germany) and Alcatel Thales (France) has been granted 10.1m EUR for a four year project funded by the European Commission to develop a new generation of biomedical lasers together with University partners. Under the acronym FAST-DOT and the leadership of the University of Dundee, a novel semiconductor design, new laser and resonator concepts will be investigated to generate new type of laser sources dedicated to biophotonic applications. The new lasers will be much smaller and more efficient than current lasers, which are not portable and are heavy on energy consumption. They will be designed for use in microscopy and nano-surgery, where high precision cutting, imaging and treatment therapies will be made possible.

The new lasers will mean that surgeons and life scientists will have access to much higher performance and lower cost lasers than are currently available and will open up exciting new application areas for lasers in biomedicine.

The includes partnerships with Universities/Institutions (FORTH Heraklion, ICFO Barcelona, U Darmstadt, U Glasgow, U Sheffield, U Athens, and U Torino.

Prof Edik Rafailov, of the University of Dundee, says "This project will revolutionise the use of lasers in the biomedical field, providing both practitioners and researchers with pocket sized ultra high performance lasers at a substantially lower cost which will make their widespread use affordable."

The industrial partners agree strongly "A step change improvement in the cost, size and robustness of ultrafast lasers is needed before they can benefit biomedical applications fully. Technologies developed by FAST-DOT will enable these lasers to migrate from the bench-top to hospitals and laboratories. We're looking forward to contributing to that transition, and developing next-generation, workhorse systems that bring new capabilities to these applications."