Benchtop systems for in vivo molecular screening of labeled compounds, as a tool to speed up drug research

For every new drug, >10,000 candidate molecules are tested for ~15 years. This is the daily mission of thousands research teams worldwide. It is well proven that small animal imaging speeds up this work, increases accuracy and decreases costs. However, commercial imaging systems have high purchase cost, require high service contracts, special facilities and trained staff. Thus, they are affordable to only few large research centres and not to the majority of small and medium research teams internationally. There are two main reasons that urge the addressing of this problem at large scale now: Firstly, small animal imaging started in 2000 and quickly research community and pharma industry understood its value, which opened preclinical imaging market (>2.5 Bil $). Continuous evolution in medicine and biology clearly shows the need to speed up research using new tools. Asian countries rapidly invest funds in drug research, enlarging existing market. Secondly, until recently such systems were based on complicated electronics and expensive components. Evolution in detector technology, electronics, software and 3D printing, made feasible the development of benchtop imaging systems, with attractive end user price. Being an active partner of numerous international and national projects, we tried to identify the main requirements that an imaging system should have, in order to become a screening tool for daily use. Thus, we recently developed a new generation of affordable, but high-performance imaging systems, which can fulfil the daily needs of all research labs activated in preclinical research. Our technology covers the field of SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography) and PET (Positron Emission Tomography) imaging, while an optical and x-ray imaging system is under development. The systems are based on well tested technology, including pixeliated scintillators, Position Sensitive Photomultipliers, programmable ADCs (Analog to Digital Converters) and FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) and are connected with a standard laptop through USB and Ethernet connection. The systems are named "eyes-series" and have been already tested for fast screening of small animals injected with labeled compounds including peptides, antibodies and nanoparticles. Besides their performance, they are offered at a fraction of the cost of the commercial ones, comparable to standard lab equipment such as HPLC, gamma counter etc, opening new prospects in preclinical research.