The CARS Explorer primary goal is to deliver innovative, minimally invasive light-based technologies and solutions to researchers in life sciences and clinicians in order to bring their practice to a higher level of reliability, precision and cost-effectiveness. By bringing together physicists, biologists and clinicians, we aim at demonstrating the proof of concept of NLO for functional in situ imaging in life science and biomedical research. The highly interdisciplinary collaboration should solve major technological problems related to the propagation of ultra-short pulses in tissues, to the sensitivity improvement of signal detection and to the nature and the extraction of information coming from the biological samples.

To bring the concept to the diagnostic level, CARS Explorer partners will explore the molecular and morphological signatures associated with tumor development in skin cancer, one of the fastest growing cancers in Europe and world wide.