I-Corps: Biodynamic Imaging Platform

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

To improve the effectiveness of drug discovery, there is a critical need for real-time physiological assays that are capable of measuring 3D living tissues responding to drugs. This project plans to establish a small and robust platform that can be placed in pharmaceutical R&D laboratories for peer testing and evaluation. Biodynamic imaging may enable discovery of new dynamic processes within tissues initiated by applied drugs and will establish the physiological-molecular mechanism-of-action connection that has been so elusive in drug discovery. Biodynamic imaging provides a physiological phenotypic profile that complements molecular target-based drug discovery. Once the connection between biodynamics and cellular function has been established, biodynamic imaging will become the tool of preference for investigations of tissue-based functional mechanisms. This project has the potential to lay the foundation for biodynamic imaging to become a new imaging tool with a broad array of future biomedical applications. These potential applications include the discovery of new drug candidates with lower side effects and lower costs to consumers, the selection of cancer chemotherapy specifically tuned to the patient to improve outcomes and patient quality of life, and improvement in the success rate of in vitro fertilization to reduce health-care costs and remove medical complications of multiple births. Because biodynamic imaging is a general imaging technique that accesses a universal property of living tissue, it can become a workhorse laboratory tool placed in virtually every life sciences laboratory.