Yamuna Phal
Colorado School of Mines, CO·Chemistry
Many medicines come in two mirror-image forms, like a left and right hand. These forms, called enantiomers, can behave very differently in the body: one may treat the disease while the other causes harmful side effects.
- Fields
Chemistry
Engineering
Pharmacology
- Topics
chirality
enantiomers
chiral drugs
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Build a mid-infrared imaging instrument capable of non-destructive, spatially resolved analysis of chiral drug interactions inside biological tissues, using molecules' infrared absorption as a chemical fingerprint.
- Convert chiroptical spectrometers, which measure a molecule's handedness through its response to twisted light, into imaging systems by integrating single-element detection schemes and engineered metamaterial assemblies.
- Demonstrate that the imager can distinguish enantiomers, the mirror-image forms of a drug, across different tissue environments and provide faster, more sensitive assessment of drug candidates.
More about the research
Current laboratory methods can tell which form is present in a sample but cannot show where in a tissue each form ends up. This project builds an imaging instrument to fill that gap, mapping how mirror-image drug molecules interact with tissue, without destroying the sample.
Why it matters
Seeing where each mirror-image form of a drug accumulates in tissue could help pharmaceutical developers select candidates that work while avoiding the harmful effects caused by the unwanted form. Faster, more sensitive screening may speed drug development and support more personalized prescribing decisions.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Mikael Backlund
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Chemistry·Early-career
Establish the fundamental limits on spatial resolution for single molecules that do not photoswitch, using quantum parameter estimation theory, which sets the best precision achievable from the emitted photons.
Nicholas Kotov
University of Michigan, MI·Materials Science
Develop CHIRON, a chiroptical second-harmonic light scattering method, by exploiting the giant nonlinear optical response of chiral nanostructures, whose lack of central symmetry makes signals strong enough to read from a single particle.
Jian Zhao
University of Oklahoma, OK·Biomedical Engineering
Build and validate O-MIR microscopy, which pairs nanosecond-pulsed mid-infrared photothermal imaging with intensity diffraction tomography, to image chemical bonds in 3D at about 250 nm lateral resolution using microsphere and fatty acid test samples.
The school
Colorado School of Mines: 4 labs on PI Pages, $110M a year on research, 124 research doctorates a year.
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