The School of Medicine’s University of Maryland - Medicine Institute for Neuroscience Discovery ( UM-MIND ) has received $2.9 million in federal funding to build a leading-edge advanced microscopy facility designed to accelerate neuroscience discoveries and innovations.
The funding will be used, in part, to purchase a new, $2 million state-of-the-art fluorescence microscope — called MINFLUX — only a handful of which are currently available in the U.S. This technology offers UMSOM faculty-scientists, their colleagues, and students the ability to study cellular processes with extreme precision, on the order of a nanoscale. Referred to as "nanoscopy," the microsope can visualize molecular events in the contacts between the brain’s neurons or reveal cancer cells interacting with healthy tissues to promote metastasis. In the drug development space, it has the potential to illuminate the mechanisms by which drugs alter protein complexes.
Federal funding for the purchase comes from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It was proposed by Maryland Senators Angela Alsobrooks and Chris Van Hollen in the 2026 federal appropriations bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump in January.
The new advanced microscopy facility will serve as one of several “cores” in UM-MIND’s new MIND X-Change program, a consortium of Maryland academic institutions that share access to advanced technologies to help find new therapies for the most vexing neurobiological disorders, including treatment-resistant depression, profound autism, and Alzheimer’s disease.
“These new technologies offer novel avenues for discovering the biological features that underpin neurological disorders, revealing unknown sources of dysfunction and new targets for prevention or intervention,” said UM-MIND Director Margaret McCarthy, PhD, who is also the UMSOM James and Carolyn Frenkil Dean's Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology. “As these tools are resource-intensive to acquire and maintain, it makes sense to build a centralized facility where all of our research collaborators may benefit from discovery opportunities and the sharing of new data and discoveries.”
Tom Blanpied, PhD , Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Physiology, will direct the new microscopy core facility, located in the UM-MIND facility in HSF-III. In addition to the Abberior MINFLUX instrument, the facility will also house an existing lightsheet fluorescence microscopy instrument and a new confocal microscope that UM-MIND will purchase with the federal funding. Confocal microscopes provide researchers a window into the structure of individual cells, while lightsheet microscopes can image large sections of brain tissue to map neural circuitry.
MINFLUX stands for Minimal Fluorescence Photon Fluxes microscopy, and MINFLUX instruments can view molecular interactions at a scale that other instruments currently on the market cannot reach. Using a donut-shaped laser beam to excite individual fluorescent molecules that then emit light, MINFLUX microscopes can produce images with a resolution less than five nanometers and capture motion occurring within milliseconds. Such precision will allow scientists to study interactions between the proteins that collectively make up a neurotransmitter receptor or the release machinery for vesicles that house the neurotransmitters in a single synapse, the contact points between nerve cells.
The MINFLUX microscope is so sensitive that it requires installation in a vibration and climate-isolated room, as temperature fluctuations as small as two degrees can cause blurring in the resulting images. It will be used in conjunction with the other high-powered scopes, which will remain important for studying larger scale cellular and neural structures.
“Once installed in the MIND X-Change microscopy core, the MINFLUX microscope will enable us to perform nanoscale visualizations, which places us among the select few institutions in the U.S. that have this capability,” said Mark T. Gladwin, MD , Dean of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Vice President for Medical Affairs, University of Maryland, Baltimore, and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor. “We are extremely grateful for the efforts of Senators Van Hollen and Alsobrooks in securing this funding for the MIND X-Change program. It’s an investment that will pay dividends in accelerating discoveries and advancing therapies for some of the greatest challenges in medicine, including addiction, neurodegenerative diseases, and Alzheimer's and dementia.”
In addition to sharing access to the MIND X-Change microscopy core, researchers and students from University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Morgan State University, University of Maryland, College Park, and the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center will also share a CRISPR-based genetic engineering core, and eventually, an AI and machine learning core.
The CRISPR-based genetic engineering core will help researchers conduct advanced gene studies to better map the genetic circuitry that determines how well neurons communicate with each other and what determines disruptions in the signaling processes that give rise to autism, for example, or brain tumors.
The planned UM-MIND AI and machine learning core will use advanced computing resources to help analyze the large mountains of data generated by neuroscience researchers, such as the many hours of video recorded by those conducting behavioral studies or the gigantic data files generated by super-resolution microscopy. Dr. McCarthy’s own research involves investigating the play behavior of adolescent rats, for instance, and AI and machine learning technologies will make the currently laborious process of combing through hours of slow-motion video recordings to categorize behaviors far more efficient and reveal aspects of behavior not readily observed by the human eye.