SMART CAMP Showcases Breakthrough Iron-Tracking Technology at Biology@CREATE Seminar

Held on 10 June, the Biology@CREATE seminar, hosted by SMART’s Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) interdisciplinary research group (IRG), brought together close to 60 attendees, including members from the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) institutions, researchers and local and visiting students, to explore how biological iron measurements can enable a range of biological applications.

Prof Jongyoon Han presenting at the Biology@CREATE Seminar

At the seminar, Prof Jongyoon Han, Principal Investigator at SMART AMR, Co-Lead Principal Investigator at SMART Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized-Medicine (CAMP), and MIT Professor, shared how quantitative measurement of biological iron in cells, tissues and the human body can provide important information for many applications, including disease diagnostics, stem cell engineering, and more.

Prof Han shared how, as a physicist by training, he became drawn to solving biological problems over the course of his research journey, starting at SMART BioSystems and Micromechanics (BioSyM), before moving to SMART AMR and SMART CAMP.

Iron and other metals play essential roles in cellular pathways, yet the medical field has long lacked reliable, non-invasive methods to detect or measure these metals in living systems. Prof Han introduced CAMP’s research aimed at addressing this gap, building on early work at SMART BioSyM and SMART AMR. 

He shared about the development of a first-of-its-kind rapid, non-destructive method to measure iron flux — the movement and rate at which cells take in, store, use and release iron — using micromagnetic resonance relaxometry (µMRR). The method provides real‑time monitoring of cellular iron changes without damaging the cells, which enables a range of interesting biological applications, including enhancing the quality of cell-based therapies.

This research and technology have also led to the establishment of LarmorBio, a spin-off founded on breakthrough technology developed at SMART and MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics, which focuses on microscale magnetic resonance blood test assays.

The session closed with an open and lively discussion between Prof Jongyoon and the audience on the potential applications of the µMRR technology, including in the fields of diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases.

The Biology@CREATE Seminar series continues to bring together leading researchers from local and global institutions to facilitate knowledge exchange and discussions with the research community on topics of importance to biological systems.