Professor Simon Ameer-Beg

Dr Simon Ameer-Beg is a Professor in Bioimaging and Biophysics within the School of Cancer and Pharmaceutical Sciences at King’s College London. SAB’s expertise is in multiphoton imaging, fluorescence anisotropy, single-molecule imaging and fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM). These methods are developed to tackle biological problems, particularly for improving measurement of protein-protein interactions using FRET methodology. He has developed time-resolved multiphoton FLIM applications for quantitative analysis of protein-protein interactions in cell culture and in vivo imaging and employed FLIM and anisotropy in high-content screening methodologies. A particular interest in deployment of systems to biological users has led him to development of numerous FLIM microscopes all situated within biological groups at KCL and elsewhere. In collaboration with Prof Robert Henderson (University of Edinburgh), he has recently led development of innovative high-speed 2-photon and confocal FLIM systems with massively parallel excitation and detection at unprecedented speeds and accuracies for scanning FLIM systems. This approach has been extended to 1024 parallel excitation/emission channels enabling video rate fluorescence lifetime imaging of protein-protein interactions in live cells using FRET/FLIM techniques in a technique we term Swept Array Microscopy (SWARM). This technology is being developed for live cell imaging of filopodial dynamics, quantitative Calcium sensing and high-content imaging applications. The group is developing instrumentation to probe CTC’s and exosomes for liquid biopsy applications in personalised medicine, single-molecule imaging instrumentation for measurement of spatio-temporal protein interaction dynamics within single cells and selective plane fluorescence lifetime imaging for whole organism mapping and tracking of macrophage activation. Dr Ameer-Beg is a consultant for a number of pharmaceutical and imaging companies, investigating membrane receptor dimerization using FLIM, flow cytometry, fluorescence anisotropy and single-molecule imaging.