GSK makes imaging deal
pharmafile | January 14, 2014 | News story | Manufacturing and Production, Sales and Marketing | 3D, GSK, imaging, npl
GlaxoSmithKline has signed a deal with the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) to develop an imaging system which can show for the first time how a drug is distributed inside cells.
The UK government is putting up funding, and the hope is that the technology will allow researchers to see relatively easily at an earlier stage of development how effective – or ineffective – new medicines are proving to be.
Tracking intracellular drug concentration is a vital part of the R&D jigsaw and could lead to fewer drugs being abandoned at a late stage of development.
However, current imaging techniques need to add special chemical labels to the drug molecule to be able to go beyond micron resolution.
The new project, called 3D nanoSIMS, aims to provide high-resolution label-free imaging in 3D – a major potential step forward, since labels can affect the way a drug behaves, thus making images uncertain.
If successful, the novel system would boost imaging sensitivity by 100 times and increase the spatial resolution to 50 nm.
This could be enough to identify exactly where drugs go at the cellular level, which means it might provide clues as to whether enough is reaching the areas which would produce the best effect in a patient – or, conversely, if a drug was causing toxicity.
The system will be based at the UK’s National Centre of Excellence in Mass Spectrometry Imaging (NiCE-MSI), which was set up by NPL and the University of Nottingham, and will receive £4.5 million from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.
“There is no technology in the world at the moment that can achieve what this project aims to do,” said Professor Ian Gilmore from NPL. “The new instrument will provide an unprecedented understanding of how different drugs work within cells, helping to assess the efficiency of current drugs and develop better ones in the future.”
Sir Colin Dollery, who is an R&D adviser at GSK as well as being on the firm’s global safety board, said: “Designing drugs that are specific for molecular targets is part of drug development but knowing that they reach their target molecule in the right amount at the right place in the right cells is only just beginning to be attainable in intact cells within tissues. This ability will be a great opportunity.”
ION-TOF, a manufacturer of mass spectrometers for imaging, will build the new instrument which incorporates the Thermo Scientific Orbitrap mass analyzer for high-performance identification of substances.
The parties say that it will also have ‘important benefits to other fields’ such as biomaterials, medical devices, regenerative medicine and next generation plastic electronics for displays.
Adam Hill
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