Darren Roblyer pioneers discoveries not only in translational biophotonics, but also through new voices and programming opportunities
By Danny Giancioppo | Photos by Kelly Peña
In order to measure blood pressure noninvasively, it may be prudent to measure how blood flows through the body using light rather than using the standard cuff-based technique. To detect fibrosis in the skin, one may find more luck using advanced optical imaging than relying on the currently used “pinch” scale. And to elevate the field of biophotonics, one may not simply focus on advancing the technologies itself, but the people, outlets, and resources within the research ecosystem. This is the path Dr. Darren Roblyer (BME, ECE) has been carving throughout his career, chasing both common and unsought biomedical engineering opportunities to improve clinical procedures and enhance the field for new and incoming voices.
Roblyer’s passion for advancing technology sprouted from a young age. “I would ride my bike to RadioShack and buy resistors and capacitors and make circuits,” he explains. “I would get soldering iron burn marks on the carpet in my room––which, you know, did not really excite my parents.” Once he went to college, it was “obvious” that his electrical engineering interests were set to collide with a high school love of biology: biomedical engineering was the perfect fit.
With a specialization in biophotonics, namely through diffuse optics––utilizing light to take two- and three-dimensional tissue measurements of the body––Roblyer says the field is “an exciting area. The idea is that you can measure deep in tissue with photons. Measure the function and structure of tissue. You don’t have any contrast agents, you don’t have any ionizing radiation. So you really can get to the patient quite quickly.”
Roblyer has pioneered new and advancing research within the field of biophotonics, and within the last two years, he’s earned a promotion to the rank of full professor, and been appointed editor-in-chief for SPIE’s new journal Biophotonics Discovery. Now, he’s gearing up for an NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program in Translational Biophotonics. But what does translational biophotonics research look like, and how does it transition from lab hands to clinicians?
Convergence with a Light Touch
Two of the largest ongoing projects in the Biomedical Optical Technologies Lab (BOTLab) focus on identifying scleroderma and advancing blood pressure technology. The first, “Spatial Frequency Domain Imaging for Monitoring of Scleroderma,” is a convergent research project spanning Boston University’s CRC and MED campuses.
“On one side of the spectrum is a physicist. The other side of the spectrum is the more clinical aspect […] and in the middle there’s lots of engineering, making devices and testing.”
Working alongside Associate Professor Andreea Bujor’s team from the Boston Medical Center (BMC), Roblyer’s lab is endeavoring to enhance the detection of scleroderma: an autoimmune disease which creates a build-up of fibrosis, or collagen, in the skin, eventually spreading to the internal organs. Because the skin is typically affected first, a common tracking method involves pinching up to seventeen select areas around the body and taking a rating from zero to three. Therein lies the issue.
“Even if you’re trained to do this, you and I might have a different ‘two’ or ‘three,’” Roblyer says. “And there’s this hypothesis that there’s been drugs that have gone through the pipeline that may have had some benefit, but because everybody’s pinch scores were a little bit different, the benefit got washed out.”
So arises the need for an objective assessment, which Roblyer and team have been able to address working with Dr. Bujor’s team. They have tested dozens of patients with a device utilizing spatial frequency domain imaging, which was previously being used on small animal imaging studies. By taking a non-contact measurement of the hand or arm, clinicians can get a quantitative read on how optically scattering a patient’s skin tissue is, thereby informing how far along the fibrosis is.
“It doesn’t take long to pinch people,” Roblyer says. “If you want a new technology to replace that, you better be better than the pinch score; you also better not take a lot more time for the clinician.” The BOTLab’s current efforts are therefore aimed toward creating a “quick point-and-shoot technology that gives you the answer on the back of the device in real time.”
The other of the two current research projects in the BOTLab is “Speckle Contrast Optical Spectroscopy for Cuffless Blood Pressure,” where Roblyer is collaborating with Neurophotonics Center director Dr. David Boas, as well as Drs. John Forman and Naomi Hamburg of the BMC.
Dr. Boas works studying blood flow in the brain using speckle technology, and Roblyer and team are working to adapt this technology to improve upon traditional photoplethysmography (PPG) methods, which currently measure changes in blood volume in superficial blood vessels, like those in your wrist or finger.
“You need something new,” Roblyer says. “The PPG tells you about how blood volume changes with each beat of the heart. Speckle tells you about how blood flow changes with each beat of the heart. Flow and volume together help you start building up a model of pressure. It tells you about the relationship between flow and volume, tells you about the stiffness, the compliance of the arteries you’re measuring. A much richer data set that’s related to blood pressure.”
With a prototype already well in development, the BOTLab is seeing new and improved methods of differentiating patients with hypertension and tracking their blood pressure noninvasively. The current goal, similarly, is to make the device more easily accessible. [Read The Brink’s article to learn more about the device]. To do this, Roblyer looks for students who can fall along a spectrum of research for his lab.
“When I talk to potential students [about the lab], the framing I usually give is: on one side of the spectrum is a physicist,” Roblyer says of the range of their lab members. “The other side of the spectrum is the more clinical aspect […] and in the middle there’s lots of engineering, making devices and testing.”
Prospective students and collaborators anywhere along that spectrum are always of interest to the BOTLab, but all students in Roblyer’s lab follow a similar cadence during their research.
“[Students] will start by building a technology, testing it in the lab, often in healthy volunteers, and then going to the hospital and measuring patients with disease.” These are complex domains, Roblyer adds, but his lab members are able to span that spectrum “extremely well,” and he finds most prospective students are motivated to follow a similar path.
But Roblyer’s work isn’t limited strictly to research. As he elevates to the next stage of his career, he’s helping develop not only the flow of research, but the community within.
The Student Becomes the Master(’s Student)
As a longtime member of SPIE, Roblyer has often collaborated with the organization on events, including helping to run a Photonics West conference for many years. When discussions arose regarding a new journal outlet, he felt confident in fulfilling that need, and Biophotonics Discovery was born with Roblyer as editor in chief.
“As you go on in your career, I think the thing you want to do is start helping new people, and maybe contributing at a larger scale if that opportunity arises.”
“There is a lot of research in the field that’s similar to what we’ve been talking about,” Roblyer says. “People trying to translate their optical technologies to patient populations, but also related to discovery on the basic science side––the biological discoveries.”
Emphasizing the “middle ground” of research and commercialization, including pilot studies, multi-sites, and developing information, Biophotonics Discovery has published two full volumes, with a third underway. They have also produced a variety of content including podcasts, commercialization and interview series, AI summaries, and more to reach audiences across different channels.
“I’m sort of mid-career,” Roblyer says regarding his work as an editor-in-chief. “Early in the mid! As you go on in your career, I think the thing you want to do is start helping new people, and maybe contributing at a larger scale if that opportunity arises.”
Running a journal isn’t the only large-scale opportunity, with Roblyer’s newly funded NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program in “Translational Biophotonics” (TBP), which will be accepting ten undergraduate students from across the country.
“What we pitched to the NSF was not just developing new optical technologies, but how do you take a technology and get it to the patient?” he explains. “We should expose students to that as early as possible. You need to fully understand the problem from a clinical, commercialization perspective, even in the research lab.”
By running a summer program which not only provides students with research opportunities, but insight into translational pathways, Roblyer hopes to help ease the way for new minds. As Roblyer puts it, by thinking about translation early, by the time students reach PhD, post-doc, and even professor roles, they will have increased productivity and chances of success––meaning benefiting patients––which only further improves the academic community and country as a whole.
“This tells you the strength of research in the country,” Roblyer says, expressing his excitement for the incoming summer cohort and the years of translational research to come. “Despite everything that’s happened, so many talented people want to get in the pipeline. If we have any problems, it’s not that! There’s just so much talent waiting and wanting to be developed.”