The cost of discovery for a new drug now exceeds $800 Million USD.

The process of High Throughput Screening (HTS) continues to drive the number of potential drug candidates. This accelerating trend will impact Drug Discovery well into the 21st century. However, since many of these potentially therapeutic candidates are promising in the test tube or biochemically, they are not absorbed by living cells or may actually be toxic on delivery. This possible inefficacy has lead pharmaceutical manufacturers to perform tests for Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion, and Toxicity or ADMET as early in the discovery process as possible in order to minimize costs by rejecting many treatment candidates. This can also speed up the entire discovery process since companies don’t waste valuable time resources in the evaluation process.

In the early 1990s, the development of CCD cameras (charge coupled device cameras) for research created the opportunity to measure features in images of cells – such as how much protein is in the nucleus, how much is outside. Sophisticated measurements soon followed using new fluorescent molecules, which are used to measure cell properties like second messenger concentrations or the pH of internal cell compartments. This process is known as High Content Screening (High Content Analysis) because much more data about ADMET can be gathered simultaneously from living cells in culture and not just on molecular interactions testing in solution.

Many systems for performing High Content Analysis are available on the market today and many of them use CCD imagers to capture images of cells in vitro either stained or unstained, immunolabeled or not. Immmunolabeling is often done with weak fluorescence emitters or with multicolor labels.

Because the imaging signal may be weak, camera sensitivity and low noise are critical performance factors in the choice of the camera included in the system. Evaluating many thousands of microplate wells in which the cells are grown makes speed of acquisition and processing critical. And, because the cell growth plates are several inches on a side, maintenance of precise focus is vital for successful testing.

Large fields of view can also contribute to the speed of image acquisition.

In this market, DVC offers a variety of cameras which give the system manufacturer a choice of sensor resolution and readout speed while maintaining low noise/high sensitivity levels in the image.

The DVC-2000 is a 1600 by 1200 (2 megapixel) high-QE, low noise camera with 20 and 40 MHz readout speed yielding a full-frame acquisition rate of up to 18 frames per second.

DVC-2000

 

The DVC-4000 Dual Port camera is a 2048 x 2048 (4 megapixel) high-QE, low noise camera. It offers software selectable 20/40 MHz clocking and single/dual-port readout capability. This camera is capable of providing a full-frame acquisition rate of up to 14.5 frames per second.

DVC-4000 Dual Port