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Harvard Center for neurodegeneration & repair to collaborate with GE Healthcare centered on Cellular Analysis

10 Aug 2005 - Harvard Center for Neurodegeneration & Repair (HCNR) and GE Healthcare have formed a collaboration using a state-of-the-art sub-cellular imaging system, the IN Cell 1000. This GE Healthcare product is now available to all members of the HCNR community and other researchers within the Harvard system across a range of disciplines. HCNR will also work with GE Healthcare to develop new software applications.
 
The IN Cell systems will primarily be used for HCNR members investigating neurodegenerative diseases and the central nervous system. GE Healthcare has provided HCNR with a sophisticated software package to accompany the instrument, which includes prepackaged, fully validated analysis routines for rapid analysis of a range of biological processes. The IN Cell Developer Toolbox has also been provided to HCNR members to accommodate applications where the pre-developed analysis routines are not suitable. Developer Toolbox gives users the flexibility to develop new cellular assay routines from a menu of pre-programmed sub routines. Simultaneously, HCNR and GE Healthcare are working together to develop the image analysis software.
 
"Despite the fact that assay development and associated instrumentation have matured to the stage that high throughput, image-based screening is feasible, there is a bottleneck around image analysis," said Stephen Wong, PhD, P.E., Director of the HCNR Center for Bioinformatics, and an associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School. "Most scientists still rely upon slow, manual analysis to extract information. This new imaging toolkit has the potential to relieve this bottleneck. We look forward to investigating new applications and tools to improve our ability to perform high content analyses."