Arizona State University has announced a $10 million gift from Leo and Annette Beus in support of the development of a groundbreaking X-ray technology.

The gift will enable ASU to complete the Beus Compact X-ray Free Electron Laser (CXFEL) Lab, now under construction at the university's Biodesign Institute. The new technology uses the most powerful X-rays in the world to capture molecules in motion and has potential applications in medicine, the "green" economy, the computer industry, and more. 

"Proteins are in constant motion, carrying out the reactions that make life possible," said John Spence, Richard Snell Professor of Physics at ASU, which has been at the forefront of efforts to adapt XFEL to biology and medicine. "We want to see life in motion, but these movements happen on a scale too small, and too fast, to be seen with microscopes. They can only be seen with XFELs."

The Beus CXFEL will "shrink" the power and cost of an XFEL lab — the European XFEL, built in 2017, spans 2.1 miles and cost $1.2 billion — into a one-of-a-kind vault in the Biodesign Institute's newest building. The gift was inspired by a chance meeting between Leo Beus and Petra Fromme, Paul V. Galvin Professor of Molecular Sciences, who, with Spence, was part of a global team that in 2010 developed the first application of XFELs to the biological world.

The Beuses — whose previous gifts to ASU have supported the creation of the Beus Center for Law and Society, ASU athletics, and scholarships — hope the new X-ray technology will help speed up the costly drug discovery process and lead to better drugs with fewer side effects.

"Right now, if you want to take a drug from beginning to end, it takes years," said Leo Beus. "And it costs hundreds of millions of dollars in most cases. It can be accelerated. I think [CXFEL] can change and revolutionize the lives of people [with] pain, malignancy, maybe even Alzheimer's, if you can figure out the proteins in the brain....And if other research scientists can have the benefit of what ASU is doing, and the technology can get spread out, it will revolutionize medicine."