From Neuroscience Research To Cell Phone Microscopy

It started in a neuroscience lab.

Andrea Antonini was researching endoscopic microscopy – essentially, microscopic imaging of the body’s internal organs – alongside other neuroscientists at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genova. But the microendoscopy field was relatively small, and he wanted to do something big.

While tooling around in the microscopy lab one day, he realized that he could use some of these lenses with his phone. It was his go-big moment. “I saw this chance to use technology to make something for consumer electronics.”

It’s an example of how an idea generated in basic, exploratory science can find a completely different niche, comments Tommaso Fellin, the head of the IIT neuroscience group that uses light-sensitive proteins to elucidate how the brain processes sensory information. To fill this niche, they began 3D printing very soft polymeric lenses, with the aim “to turn the cell phone into a potent and portable digital microscope.”

And in 2015 the two founded a spinoff company, SmartMicroOptics, where Antonini began working fulltime one year later. He was eventually joined by his wife as an administrator, along with a marketing specialist.

Those pliable lenses turned into the product Blips: miniature lenses attached to a film, which sticks to a phone or tablet. Depending on the model, this allows magnification of about 8–45x and resolution of up to 3 micrometers. It’s a very simple press-and-use product.

Blips led to a more advanced mobile microscopy kit in a box, which can achieve detail of below 1 micrometer. This system is known as DIPLE. The product’s box is also the “mechanical structure for the system,” Antonini explains as he smoothly assembles the kit in about one minute. This structure houses the battery-powered light source and acts as the base for the platform (“stage”), where the user screws in the lens.

Depending on the model, kits also come with plain slides; slides prepared with insect, plant, and blood samples; a microscope ruler; and other items like a pipette and tweezers. The whole kit weighs a bit over a pound, and can be set up easily even by middle-schoolers. And of course, because it’s designed around the smartphone, photos and videos can be shot using the magnification.

It’s not the only portable microscope available, but “in my opinion, we have the best cost-performance ratio,” Antonini believes. A kit with a platform, light source, and lenses currently runs from approx. $60 to $155. He says that this means that each student in a class could have their own personal microscopy system for the same price as a single conventional microscope that lives inside a classroom.

The company has weathered some ups and downs. Blips and DIPLE were initially launched on goal-smashing Kickstarter campaigns, and the company had some early success before the pandemic hit. This led to the now-familiar supply chain issues with specific components, but also to some changes in customers’ focus.

For instance, in one promotional campaign SmartMicroOptics collaborated with a head lice shampoo company to provide a Blips lens along with a bottle of shampoo. Thus kids or their families would be able to detect whether the lice had been eradicated by the shampoo. During the pandemic, lice became less of a problem because children weren’t clustering together at school, passing around the parasites.

In recent years researchers and health workers have been trying DIPLE out in more sophisticated ways as well. It’s been tested to diagnose bacterial vaginosis in the US, and water quality in Rwanda and Costa Rica. Researchers at the University of Pisa have also tried applying DIPLE to malaria detection. (Certification would be needed for clinical uses.)

Antonini believes that the portability could make it useful in remote and low-resource environments; the light battery can last up to two days with continuous use, he says. As well, according to Antonini, the portable system has been useful for prescreening of field samples, to bring the microscope to the field rather than the sample to the laboratory. DIPLE can’t match the power of a conventional microscope, of course, but it may be a useful supplement.

If they’re able to expand, Antonini wants to create subject-specific kits based on people’s requests. For instance, marine biologists have expressed a desire for lenses with a greater working distance from the object, while agronomists have asked for tools customized to check soil structure.

If every student, scientist, and simply curious person can essentially carry a microscope in their pocket, there are dazzling prospects for opening up the natural world to all.

This story was reported during a journalism-in-residence fellowship at the Italian Institute for Technology (IIT), funded by the European Research Council (ERC).