The Boston Globe - December 22, 2008

Putting the past under a microscope
The Boston Globe

As a former biomedicine executive, Dr. Gregory Bearman seems to be an unlikely candidate to conduct a forensic analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But when the Israel Museum in Jerusalem needed someone who specializes in microscopes to analyze and catalog the scrolls for a project that will track their deterioration, it called the retired chief biomedical scientist of Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Bearman, in turn, called Cambridge Research & Instrumentation Inc., or CRi, a Woburn company that specializes in building systems for the rapidly evolving multispectral life-sciences imaging business - in simpler language, that's the business of manufacturing highly sophisticated microscopes.

Bearman had worked closely with CRi during his career in biomedicine and saw an opportunity to use the company's systems in his post-retirement career as a rare-documents specialist.

Privately held CRi has 50 employees. Its systems are most often used in the life sciences. For example, a pathologist can use its computer-driven microscopes to detect cancer cells on a microscope slide more easily than if he relied on his own eye. And drug developers can use the equipment to analyze how different compounds will interact.

Bearman correctly suspected the system's ability to take near-infrared images would be useful in capturing an accurate and detailed snapshot of the scrolls. He was also able to use CRi equipment to read previously obscured portions of the scrolls.

"It's pretty amazing. The scrolls were physically accessible, but unreadable. Now they can make out the characters on them," said Peter J. Miller, who cofounded CRi in 1985 and serves as its chief science officer. "Of course, the system can't answer the big question, which is, 'What do they say?' "

The scrolls, discovered between 1947 and 1958 in 11 caves near the shore of the Dead Sea on the West Bank, encompass about 800 documents and include texts from the Hebrew Bible. Part of Bearman's work includes making the scrolls available online. His analysis will also be used to track how they age over time.

Bearman isn't alone in turning to CRi for solutions. The Church of Latter-day Saints, which conducts extensive Biblical-era document analysis, is also a client. And in the mid-1990s the Internal Revenue Service started using CRi equipment to identify forged documents.

The system used in the Dead Sea Scroll analysis is called a Nuance multispectral imaging system. Its elaborate software program can isolate certain aspects of an image - for example, noncancerous cells can be separated from cancerous ones. To treat diseases like breast cancer, such information is crucial in determining why some therapies work only for some patients.

"It used to be that people thought breast cancer was one disease, but we now know there are seven or eight pathways in cancer that we can target to suppress," Miller said. "That's why you'd have clinical trials where two people might get sick, three people may not have any reaction, and two more people might get better."

Studying older, discredited therapies with the Nuance system may lead to breakthroughs in cancer treatment, Miller said.

The prospects for advancing treatments have garnered some attention for CRi and its system. Last month, chief executive George Abe traveled to Ohio to accept an award from the Cleveland Clinic for Nuance, which was named one of the year's 10 most promising medical innovations.

"This is a tool that will enable people to further the goals of personal medicine - the idea of treating the individual patient and their specific ailment," Abe said. "This can answer the question, 'Which type of breast cancer do you have?' which can lead to more effective treatment."