Behind the Optical Solutions that Help Detect Malaria and Treat Brain Cancer
After 20 years in business, Optics for Hire, a Massachusetts-based engineering consulting firm, has amassed a notable list of optical solutions, many of which continue to fly under the radar.
That’s oftentimes the nature of orchestrating component solutions that are embedded in larger products or applications. And to this end, Optics for Hire has made impressive contributions by designing lenses for self-driving cars, medical devices for detecting malaria in blood and with its contributions to optical treatments for brain cancer.
“What we bring to the table is our understanding of optics and photonics and using that on different applications,” said Ellis, an entrepreneur, inventor and founder of Optics for Hire. “Really, the brilliant people are the people who are putting that into applications and those are our customers,” Ellis said.
A Diagnostic System to Detect Malaria
One of Ellis’s customers was a spinout from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that won several business plan awards. They had an inexpensive way to detect malaria in the blood by using magnets that reacted with malaria markers in the blood by getting a different optical signal. They engaged Optics for Hire’s to design and build the diagnostic system, which encompassed the magnetic field that created a differentiation between blood that had malaria and blood that was malaria free.
“That was about eight or 10 years ago,” Ellis said. “I think they’re still working on that technology. It hasn’t achieved mass market success.”
Not all products go on to sell millions of units, pointed out Ellis, and there are many reasons that a product would succeed or not succeed.
A solution that has seen a greater measure of success by commercial standards is the custom lens technology Optics for Hire developed during the early stages of developing autonomous vehicles.
In the early 2000s, DARPA—the defense agency responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the United States military—ran a contest calling prospective participants to drive a fully autonomous car through the desert.
“In my recollection, nobody succeeded at getting a car to do that,” recalled Ellis. But one of the race’s entrants was a car with a good system developed by pioneers Dave Hall and Bruce Hall. The system happened to be LiDAR, and Ellis notes that it was “built better than what anyone else was doing for creating maps of the environment that informed their car.”
“They wound up starting a company called Velodyne and selling that LiDAR technology to all kinds of automotive suppliers, and they eventually went public,” said Ellis. “They’ve had their ups and downs since then but when they were in their early stages before they really built out a full engineering team, they engaged with us to design some of those lenses that were sending the laser light out and then collecting it after it had been in the scene and come back to their photo detectors.
In any opto-mechanical lens design that involves multiple elements, an ability to hold all the lenses correctly is imperative. “And that was the work we did for them,” Ellis said.
Optical Treatments for Brain Cancers
More recently, Optics for Hire was involved in an application where a patient could ingest a fluorescent marker designed to flash during a surgery, allowing the surgeon to see better what tissue needs to be removed and what tissue can stay.
“There’s some optics around imaging that area through a camera and getting the right fluorescent transmission,” said Ellis. “And there’s further research from a different client about certain benefits of using fluorescent light to treat parts of the brain cancer that were not removed.”
One of the tasks that Optics for Hire would need to figure out is how light moves through brain tissue and what research can tell scientists and surgeons about shining an LED light at a particular wavelength. “Is it going to be absorbed, is it going to bounce around?” explained Ellis. “How do we design optics to take that LED light and direct it to where we want it with as much efficiency as possible?”
The possibilities for studying and refining the use of light in medical applications appear endless for Ellis and his team. “Whether it’s looking at skin or the eye,” he said, “you can only get so far with optical modeling and design because we just don’t have all the information and haven’t really done the research to figure out all the characteristics of the skin.
“Even if there are a lot of companies doing diagnostics or treatments of the skin, people’s skin is different, it has different pigmentation, it behaves differently at different ages in life. You can have different kinds of things on your skin that have different optical properties.”
Ellis noted that ongoing research is needed on how the body responds to light and how human physiology works with optical systems.
Watch additional parts of this interview series with John Ellis:
Part 1: Inventors Manipulate Light and Optics to Solve Everyday Problems
Part 3: Ask the Inventor: What Room Does AI Leave for Inventing New Solutions?
