AISAT

Development of a new high throughput automated imaging system to carry out drug sensitivity measurements on primary leukemia/lymphoma cells to assist individualized assay guided therapy

 Partecipanti

Mappa

 Word cloud

Esplora la "nuvola delle parole (Word Cloud) per avere un'idea di massima del progetto.

 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'The aim of the project is to build a new robust prototype of a high throughput automated imaging system that can be used in routine clinical lab environment for gathering data on drug sensitivity patterns of primary leukemia/lymphoma cells. The device will assist individualized assay guided therapy. The laboratory at the host institute has recently created a new microculture system that allows viability testing of drug treated primary tumor cells. The present system is exclusively based on commercially available components. It is also very complex and expensive. The primary data gathered on this system however appears to be so valuable that it warrants the development of a new, simpler, but highly parallelized device with a six fold increase in the work capacity for one twentieth of the price. The device will promote both basic research and improve adequate patient care. There is a long going and very fruitful collaboration between the host laboratory at the Karolinska institute and the home laboratory of the applicant that among other led to the development of novel surface plasmon resonance methods to study protein-protein interactions. The knowledge and experience of the applicant together with the preliminary development that has already taken place at the accepting institute provides a solid foundation for likely success. The applicant will also participate in a formal doctoral training in tumor biology and will contribute to the expansion of the imaging core facility of the Karolinska Institute.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

Individualised therapy for leukaemia patients has been given a boost from research by the AISAT project. The scientists have built a high-throughput automated imaging system to gather data on drug sensitivity of primary leukaemia cells.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

To determine whether diseased cells are responsive to drugs being applied, high-throughput microscopic imaging devices are used. Currently, the devices available are often bulky, slow and moreover expensive. As such, they are not suitable for routine clinical diagnosis or even academic research.

Work by an EU-funded Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) project, AISAT, promises to solve these problems with the total redesign of the optical visualisation pathway of the microscope. Among the many improvements to the equipment is replacement of bulky cameras with sensitive, high resolution complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) chips.

Also featuring in the list of technical upgrades are new electronic circuit boards for primary image capture, illumination control, and high-precision motor movement control and data integration.. Software written specially permits a single-push button operation with automatic auto-focusing, multicolour image collection and adaptive image correction.

The final prototype device, Hexascope 3.0, has been fully tested and subject to redesign cycles after improvements were applied. The resulting prototype is bench-top sized and can image the entire area of a 384 well cell culture microplate in three colours. Furthermore, the resolution allows the evaluation of seeded cancer cells as well as details of cell morphology changes for high content analysis imaging.

For the effects of drugs on cells taken from patient's blood, the Hexascope 3.0 can provide information on 30 drugs at 4 different concentrations in triplicate for each plate. The device is currently under test using blood samples from clinics from patients with leukaemia in Hungary and Sweden.

Results from the samples are being supplied to oncologists to assist in individualised assay-based therapy for the patients. AISAT intends to provide this new technology to other clinics and laboratories for assay purposes and, importantly for research institutes, drug discovery.