Cellular Imaging & Analysis
Joe Trask, Head, Cellular Imaging Core The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences
The advancements in modern-day cellular imaging, along with genomic information, has allowed scientists to probe deeper into the underlying mechanisms of cellular functions, effects of protein transcription, cell pathway signaling, and ultimate fate of the cell's life cycle all in an effort to better understand the developmental processes and finding treatment or even cure of human diseases. It has been a little more than a decade since automated fluorescent microscopy image analysis or better known as High Content Screening (HCS) was introduced to the scientific community, but the approach has been occurring for almost 20 years, the knowledge and lessons learned over this time has provided an insight of where the technology is today and what to expect in the coming years. Today, almost every pharmaceutical company has implemented some version of HCS into the drug discovery process, as well as many biotechnical firms with the promise of identifying new drug target indications, validating targets, and use in small compound drug discovery, toxicity assessment, biomarker identification, and pre-clinical studies. Academia institutions have also invested in HCS, initially in core centers, but now the technology is branching out into well-funded departments. The approaches are similar to the pharmaceutical industry but at a much lower throughput except for a few NIH-funded small molecule compound and RNAi screening centers. Academic centers are utilizing the technology in basic science programs to extract large amounts of cellular data information to better understand cell functions and mechanisms of actions in developmental biology and target-based identification in diseased tissue. The continued effort and synergy between academia and industry should lead to new discoveries which for scientists are the ultimate goal. In the same year man landed on the moon, Azriel Rosenfeld at the University of Maryland in 1969 accumulated scientific findings to describe image analysis and reference the work as "picture processing by computer." Since then, the scientific community has flourished by a combined innovation in the advancement of computer technology, optical detection using fast CCD or CMOS cameras and photomultiplier tubes (PMT), light sources including lasers, robust microscopes, and enhanced labeling of cells. During the mid-90's two instrumental scientists took the automated inverted wide-field microscopy image analysis technology to the forefront in Lansing Taylor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and Jeffery Price at University of California at San Diego. The innovation and advancement of science at this time led to the explosion of the current HCS landscape in industry and academia today.
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