ISAC's constituent bodies are set to engage in further ground breaking collaborative research and design with confirmation of the National Physical Laboratory's (NPL) 3D nanoSIMS project.
NPL were delighted to announce this exciting undertaking as a collaboration between the National Centre of Excellence in Mass Spectrometry Imaging (NICE-MSI) at NPL, leading pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), leading imaging mass spectrometer manufacturer ION-TOF, Professor Luke Hanley from the Department of Chemisty at the University of Illinois, and Professors Clive Roberts and Morgan Alexander from the School of Pharmacy at the University of Nottingham.
"This eminent project team is designing a Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS) instrument to better the micrometre resolution imaging currently available, by developing a 3D label-free molecular imaging system with nanometric spatial resolution. Currently, one of the major challenges to the pharmaceutical industry is the measurement of the intracellular drug concentration. This powerful new instrument could help identify where drugs go at the cellular level, even within specific organelles, answering long-standing questions about whether drug concentrations are sufficiently high in the right places to have a therapeutic effect, or if the medicine is lodging within cellular components and causing toxicity. If anomalies were spotted earlier it might help to explain toxicities or lack of efficacy of a medicine and reduce costly late-stage failures".
For more information on the 3D nanoSIMS project, its background, its goals and its aims see the full NPL news release.
For an introduction to (ToF-)SIMS visit our dedicated facilities page.
Posted on Wednesday 11th December 2013