Label-Free Multiphoton Imaging for Longitudinal Monitoring of Skin Therapies

Multiphoton microscopy (MPM) offers a unique window into living human skin, revealing cellular and tissue-level changes without exogenous labels. Current methods for evaluating dermatologic therapies rely largely on visual scoring or biopsies, which are either too coarse to capture early cellular responses or too invasive for repeated measurements. Realizing MPM’s potential for treatment monitoring, however, requires moving beyond microscopic snapshots to reproducible measurements of cellular responses over time.

Balu’s team developed the Fast, Large-Area Multiphoton Exoscope (FLAME) to address key challenges in longitudinal clinical imaging. Large-area imaging enables relocating and reimaging the same skin regions over time, while advancements in fluorescence lifetime imaging and image analysis help us to identify and quantify cellular and immune responses without labels. This presentation will highlight longitudinal human studies showing how these approaches capture evolving treatment-induced changes, positioning clinical MPM as a quantitative tool for monitoring therapeutic response and developing noninvasive imaging biomarkers in skin.

About the presenter
Mihaela Balu, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the Beckman Laser Institute, in the Departments of Dermatology and Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. Her team’s research focuses on advancing the clinical translation of multiphoton microscopy, with support from federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Defense (DoD), as well as pharmaceutical companies.