I-Corps: Biodynamic Imaging Platform

为了提高药物发现的有效性，迫切需要能够测量3D生物组织对药物反应的实时生理测试。该项目计划建立一个小型而强大的平台，可以放置在制药研发实验室进行同行测试和评估。生物动力学成像可能会发现应用药物在组织内启动的新的动态过程，并将建立在药物发现中一直难以捉摸的生理-分子作用机制联系。生物动力学成像提供了一种生理表型特征，补充了基于分子靶点的药物发现。一旦建立了生物动力学和细胞功能之间的联系，生物动力学成像将成为研究基于组织的功能机制的首选工具，该项目有可能为生物动力学成像成为一种具有广泛未来生物医学应用的新成像工具奠定基础。这些潜在的应用包括发现副作用更低、消费者成本更低的新药候选药物，选择专门针对患者的癌症化疗以改善结果和患者的生活质量，以及提高体外受精的成功率以降低医疗保健成本和消除多胞胎的医疗并发症。由于生物动力学成像是一种通用的成像技术，它可以获得活组织的普遍属性，它可以成为几乎每个生命科学实验室中的主要实验室工具。

To improve the effectiveness of drug discovery, there is a critical need for real-time physiological assays that are capable of measuring 3D living tissues responding to drugs. This project plans to establish a small and robust platform that can be placed in pharmaceutical R&D laboratories for peer testing and evaluation. Biodynamic imaging may enable discovery of new dynamic processes within tissues initiated by applied drugs and will establish the physiological-molecular mechanism-of-action connection that has been so elusive in drug discovery. Biodynamic imaging provides a physiological phenotypic profile that complements molecular target-based drug discovery. Once the connection between biodynamics and cellular function has been established, biodynamic imaging will become the tool of preference for investigations of tissue-based functional mechanisms.This project has the potential to lay the foundation for biodynamic imaging to become a new imaging tool with a broad array of future biomedical applications. These potential applications include the discovery of new drug candidates with lower side effects and lower costs to consumers, the selection of cancer chemotherapy specifically tuned to the patient to improve outcomes and patient quality of life, and improvement in the success rate of in vitro fertilization to reduce health-care costs and remove medical complications of multiple births. Because biodynamic imaging is a general imaging technique that accesses a universal property of living tissue, it can become a workhorse laboratory tool placed in virtually every life sciences laboratory.