College first in Europe with medical facility
The €2 million imaging and screening facility provides extremely advanced imaging of human cells and will accelerate drug discovery in cancer and inflammatory diseases.
Launched yesterday at TCD’s Institute of Molecular Medicine, based at St James’s Hospital, the high content analysis facility can generate several hundred items of scientific data from one cell. The technology focuses on how the human genome functions and its role in disease.
It is in use at the institute in research examining how cancer will respond to prospective therapies by assessing the functions of each individual gene in the human genome, in a process called gene silencing Dr Yuri Volkov, senior lecturer in molecular medicine at the institute, said high content imaging technologies had become “indispensable tools” in understanding how the human body works at cellular level. “The scale and speed of this technology is unmatched by conventional analytical tools. It has the capacity of providing up to several hundred items of scientific data from the one cell sample and can potentially increase the speed of diagnostic tests by 100-200 times for patients,” said Dr Volkov. The technology is currently being used in research and not to diagnose patients.
The institute is also a leader in nano-medicine. With the aid of High Content Analysis, the “nano-drugs” of the future are already being developed in the centre.
“Nano-materials, tiny objects, often smaller in size than viruses and even single protein molecules, have a capacity to penetrate through the tissues and cell membranes of the human body reaching the nucleus, or the ‘heart of the cell’ in a matter of minutes,” said Dr Volkov.
Using high content analysis, institute scientists recently made a groundbreaking discovery concerning the way the Hepatitis C virus escapes the immune defence.
