Iatrogenic nerve damage remains a significant surgical complication, often resulting in chronic pain, functional loss and decreased quality of life. High resolution fluorescence imaging across ex vivo to in vivo settings, ongoing proteomics experiments, demyelinating animal models, and human cross reactivity are utilized to determine biomolecular interactions, informing novel synthetic structure activity relationship (SAR) studies, as well as clinically significant findings. This effectively lays the groundwork for disease-specific imaging applications and the expansion of advance both clinical and research-based diagnostics and future rational design of small molecule, tissue targeted fluorophores.
