14 March 2021 ESRFnews

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The first publicised EBS data give a taste of the awesome imaging possibilities of the new source and herald a revolution in our physiological understanding of disease.

AT present count, Peter Lee and his medical teams in Germany and France have shown the images of a COVID-19-injured lung to more than 100 physi- cians and biologists worldwide. Every time, he witnesses the same reaction. First they say, Wow! And then they scratch their heads. They ve never had to think about how to use this kind of information it s not existed before. The images including the one opposite are the first

data to be publicised after the ESRF s EBS upgrade, and it is easy to see why people are impressed. Even to the untrained eye, the level of detail contained in them is astonishing. At the click of a mouse, everything is visible, from the entire organ and its major airways, all the way down to the alveoli and the finest micro-vasculature. But to medical scientists, the images are way more than just aesthetically pleasing. They promise a new era in histology, where entire organs even entire bodies can be biopsied without lifting a scal- pel, unmasking the complex and interconnected pathol- ogies of disease. The preliminary data are so striking that in December they resulted in a $1 m ( 820 k) grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropy founded by Priscilla Chan, a paediatrician, and her husband Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. By 2023, if all goes to plan, Lee and his colleagues will have imaged an entire

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ANATOMICAL IMAGING

ESRFMar21_Long-feature_v7.indd 14 26/02/2021 10:32