2023 Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ferenc Krausz is exploring how ultrafast laser science could help medicine spot disease long before symptoms appear. His vision combines physics, artificial intelligence, and repeated blood sampling into a new model for preventive care.
Speaking at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, Krausz said the key challenge in healthcare is not only collecting more data, but collecting the right kind of data. He argues that many AI systems are trained mostly on information from people who are already ill, leaving the long pre-symptomatic phase underrepresented.
How the method works
The approach focuses on blood plasma. Researchers expose a sample to an extremely short infrared laser pulse, which makes molecules vibrate and emit signals that reveal a broad molecular pattern. Instead of tracking a single marker such as glucose or cholesterol, the technique reads a much richer molecular fingerprint.
According to Krausz, that fingerprint can produce hundreds of parameters at once. The challenge is interpretation, since age, diet, sleep, medication, and lifestyle all shape blood chemistry. To make the method useful, scientists must distinguish meaningful change from normal variation in each individual.
Rather than comparing one person only with population averages, the project tracks how their own blood profile shifts over time. That repeated measurement could make it possible to notice subtle changes before a disease becomes clinically visible.
Early results and expansion
The first large-scale effort is the Health for Hungary program, which has already enrolled nearly 13,000 participants and collected more than 73,000 plasma samples. The target is 15,000 adults over 40. Early findings suggest that certain infrared variables may drift outside a person's usual range years before diagnoses such as thyroid disease, lung disease, cardiovascular disease, or type 2 diabetes.
Krausz stresses that these are still candidate signals, not confirmed biomarkers. Larger studies will be needed to verify whether the patterns reliably predict disease onset.
The project is now expanding internationally through the protecting.health initiative, linking teams in Budapest, Munich, and Hong Kong. Researchers aim to build one of the largest longitudinal blood datasets in the world, with the goal of improving early screening and personalized prevention.
If validated, this laser-based approach could help medicine move closer to a future where disease is tracked earlier, more precisely, and before symptoms take hold.