Researcher

Lu Wei

Profile

Lu Wei is a chemical biologist at Caltech who develops advanced optical imaging technologies to study metabolic processes in living cells and organisms with high chemical specificity and spatial resolution. Her laboratory has made seminal contributions to stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy, adapting this powerful technique to image specific biomolecules—including deuterium-labeled metabolites, lipids, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids—in live cells without exogenous fluorescent labels. This label-free metabolic imaging approach has enabled the visualization of lipid metabolism in individual cells, revealing heterogeneity in metabolic states within cell populations that is invisible to bulk assays. Her group also developed super-multiplex vibrational imaging using electronic pre-resonance SRS to image dozens of molecular species simultaneously. These innovations in chemical imaging have significant applications in drug discovery (understanding drug distribution and metabolism in tissues), cancer biology (mapping tumor metabolic heterogeneity), and microbiology (tracking metabolism in individual bacteria or cells in microbiomes). Science buyers in pharmaceutical imaging, drug metabolism, and basic cell biology research follow Wei's laboratory for next-generation microscopy solutions applicable to drug candidate evaluation.

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