Spatial biology & imaging
NanoMslide Plasmonics — Stain-Free Tissue Imaging
Reading the architecture of cancer tissue without dyes, lasers, or expensive instruments.
Second-harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy — the current gold standard for collagen imaging — requires a multiphoton instrument costing upwards of $500,000, available in only a small number of research centres globally. NanoMslide® was developed to break that barrier.
The collagen scaffold that surrounds a tumor — its extracellular matrix — holds powerful clues about how cancer behaves, but seeing it usually demands costly laser-based microscopes available in only a handful of labs. NanoMslide offers a different path: specially engineered plasmonic slides that reveal collagen structure directly in standard, clinic-ready FFPE tissue sections, with no stains and no fluorescent labels.
The result is an accessible alternative to expensive specialist imaging, designed to bring rich spatial information within reach of ordinary pathology workflows. By lowering the barrier to mapping tissue architecture, the approach could make this layer of cancer biology routinely visible. The work is described in a manuscript currently in submission.
