Source: BioOptics World

Last November, the Cleveland Clinic (Cleveland, OH) ranked an optical molecular imaging system as one of the year's top ten medical innovations. "We believe this technology to be a game changer," said Jennifer Hunt, the clinic's head of surgical pathology. "When we're talking about tumors, we're talking about what information we can gain about that tumor to guide and direct therapy, prognosis, and diagnostics," she said, referring to the clinic's use of the Nuance system by Cambridge Research & Instrumentation, Inc. (CRi; Woburn, MA). "Being able to analyze multiple markers in a single cell to understand the behavior of signaling pathways will significantly aid in disease diagnosis and therapy development."

While the first big application for in-vivo optical molecular imaging was infectious disease, oncology has been an important next step according to Caliper Life Sciences' (Hopkinton, MA) Stephen Oldfield PhD. Indeed, Carestream Health Molecular Imaging (Rochester, NY) reports a surge of interest from oncologists just in the past couple of years. William McLaughlin, Director of Research and Advanced Applications for Carestream, says that at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting two years ago, he saw significantly more interest in analytical techniques such as gel documentation and western blotting-but in 2008 noticed that more people were asking about the newer technology. Then at this year's AACR meeting (April 18-22, Denver, CO), the majority of leads were for in vivo imaging, he said. To read more, click here.