DEVELOPMENT OF NEW OPTOGENETICS PRODUCTS



A word from Sead Doric:
Our traditional activities are the fabrication of optical components and contract manufacturing of photonics assemblies. In addition, Doric Lenses engages in variety of photonics product developments impossible to present all at once. I will try to shed some light on these less-known activities at doric on my blogs which will hopefully become more frequent.

This blog I devote to optogenetics. Our involvement with optogenetics started few years ago when Feng Zhang from Deisseroth's Lab at Stanford University asked us to develop a fiber-optic rotary joint or commutator as it was called then. After several email exchanges between Zhang and our engineers, the product was developed and sent to customer. Short-while later, the Stanford group published a paper www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/27/52/14231 describing their optogenetics experiment that made use of our rotary joint. The paper and optogenetics procedure it describes became an instant hit not only among international neuroscience community but among the mainstream media as well. A simple Google search on "Optogenetics" will reveal articles in Boston Globe, Wall-Street Journal, Scientific American, Wikipedia, Nature, Laser Focus World etc. Unlike most of our customers, who understandably consider cooperation with Doric Lenses Inc as their secret weapon, Deisseroth's group have, in their article, explicitly mentioned Doric Lenses Inc as manufacturer of the fiber-optic rotary joint. Consequently, we received a flood of requests for the rotary joint from labs all over the world as they were scrambling to reproduce similar experiments. Encouraged by the initial interest in our rotary joint, we have intensified our work in this new field. So far, that has resulted in a better quality fiber-optic rotary joints and a number of other optogenetics products developed through working closely with the best-known neurology labs worldwide.

During my recent visit to Gulbenkian Institute in Lisbon, Portugal, courtesy of Guillaume Dugué, I had a chance to see several functional optogenetics labs, meet with researchers working in optigenetics field and discuss their needs. This visit has helped us enormously to better understand the needs of researchers and consequently define new optogenetics products. The products that will be appearing on our website shortly, are direct consequence of our interaction with optogenetics scientists at Stanford, Gulbenkian and some other labs.

Our aim is to make our fiber-optics expertise accessible to optogenetics community, fulfill their current photonics product needs and anticipate the future ones. If you need a help with optogenetics product development you can write to me at sead@doriclenses.com. I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Sead Doric, President