12/01/03
By Sue Vorenberg
Tribune Reporter
© The Albuquerque Tribune.

Helping doctors to find a cure for Lou Gehrig's disease isn't just a job for Paul Gourley.

It's personal.

His grandfather died of Lou Gehrig's when Gourley was young. Even though Gourley, now a Sandia National Laboratories scientist, isn't a doctor, he has invented a way to help doctors see how well a variety of drugs fight Lou Gehrig's, Alzheimer's, Gulf War Syndrome and other neurological diseases.

"It's motivating to think about the possibilities of what this can do to alleviate suffering and pain," Gourley said. "It was hard to see my grandfather waste away from Lou Gehrig's disease. It was agonizing."

You can tell from looking at Gourley's lab and his office that he's not a narrowly focused scientist. Shelves are crowded with books on biophysics, optics, fluid dynamics and other cryptically worded topics.

His lab is full of microscopes, computers and sensing equipment, stacked on every inch of tabletop.

To help him develop the medical technology, Gourley, who has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois, taught himself biology and biophysics.

His usual expertise lies with tiny lasers, called VCSELs, that project a beam smaller than the diameter of a human hair. He and other Sandia scientists played a major role in inventing the lasers, which are used in telecommunications and sensing devices.

"After helping to create VCSEL lasers, Paul's idea was to use them to fight disease by seeing different types of blood cells," said Neil Singer, a Sandia spokesman. "He started out running normal cells and cancer cells across the surface of the laser and seeing how the light changed as it went through the cells."

It turned out the light looked different when it went through a healthy cell than a cancer cell. But then, something unexpected happened.

"As I was looking at the light properties of all these different cells," Gourley said, "I noticed that the mitochondria looked different than other parts of the cells. That's when I realized we should start looking at just the mitochondria, and maybe we could make a difference in diseases like the one my grandfather had."

Mitochondria are the power supplies inside every cell. In neurological diseases, something happens to the mitochondria, causing them to swell and then explode.

"If we can find a drug to protect the mitochondria and keep it from swelling, we may be able to stop or slow the progress of the diseases," Gourley said.

To do that, he's working with Marcus Keep, a neurosurgeon at University of New Mexico Hospital. Keep is testing Cyclosporin A, an immunosuppresive medication, as a way to seal mitochondria and keep it from being damaged.

Cell samples are sucked through a small plastic tube and pulled over the surface of the laser, then pulled away again through another small tube. As samples pass by, the laser flashes through them and a sensor above tells a computer how the light has changed.

"It's the perfect testing method for Cyclosporin A and other drugs that are very expensive to test through other means," Singer said. "Often, other methods like electron microscopy take days to use."

Electron microscopes cost about $500,000. Gourley's method - when a full-scale drug-testing machine is built from it - will cost about $100,000, he said.

With the method, hundreds of mitochondria can run through the machine in a minute.

"Hopefully, this will help doctors find a cure, or a better way to fight these diseases, more quickly," Gourley said.

Gourley won a Department of Energy award for his research in August in the Chunky Bullet Competition. He will present his findings at the Photonics West Conference in San Jose in January and has a paper coming out in the proceedings from that conference.

Gourley plans to use his device to see even smaller objects, such as strands of viruses and pathogens.

"That has obvious homeland security applications," he said. "If we can see different types of viruses, which are smaller than mitochondria, we can tell right away if people are being exposed to something like a biological weapon."