THE EMERGING IMPORTANCE OF
DISEASE TISSUE

Disease tissues contain comprehensive information about cellular alterations that cause disease and influence outcomes. The emergence of gene expression profiling and proteomics technologies has enabled researchers to begin discovering and analyzing disease-associated genes and proteins in tissues that may serve as new drug targets and diagnostic biomarkers, and is advancing understanding of the role of signaling proteins in biochemical disease pathways.

These developments herald a new era of tissue use in drug discovery and pathology, enabling comparative studies of normal and disease tissues to conjecture possible side effects of therapeutic intervention early in the drug development process, facilitating clinical trial design through the systematic investigation of tissues from large patient populations, reducing the typically high attrition rate and high cost of new drug development by enabling rapid and early assessment of clinical relevance, and advancing personalized medicine.

To acquire high-resolution images of microscopic samples for pathology and drug discovery research, conventional widefield light microscopy and, in particular, confocal scanning microscopy, have become indispensable tools. Confocal imaging uses focused light from a laser to visualize deep into cells and tissues, allowing highly detailed views not only of structural details smaller than a cell, but also the dynamics of cellular processes. Using confocal imaging, researchers are able to examine clinical specimens from diseased tissues, test new drug candidates on drug targets, and observe morphological and molecular biological changes of cells and tissues during the course of a disease or in response to treatment.

BPI has developed an advanced confocal imaging system that addresses two of the major requirements to drive confocal technology forward:

• The ability to simultaneously detect multiple fluorescent biomarkers: Compared to immunohistochemistry brightfield methods, fluorescent dyes have the advantage of an improved dynamic range and multiplexing capability, resulting in improved quantification, ultimately making research and analysis more reliable. As increasing numbers of fluorescent biomarkers are developed, the requirement for fluorescence for advanced quantitative molecular imaging is moving into the mainstream clinical market.
  
  
• Panoramic imaging: A standard biomedical slide is 1” x 3” and a typical tissue specimen is 10 mm in diameter. To form a high-resolution image of the entire specimen, a conventional widefield light microscope must collect a large number of small images of the specimen and tile them together to create a large digital mosaic of the specimen, a time-consuming and error-prone process.
  

BPI’s revolutionary panoramic confocal imaging system is capable of imaging an entire microscope slide without tiling and makes fluorescence examination of large specimens without tiling possible for the first time.