News

The pharmaceutical industry takes up results of EMRP project TReND (NEW01) for use in imaging equipment to measure drug disposition

The pharmaceutical industry has used results from the TReND project in the development of a 3D label-free molecular imaging system with nanometric spatial resolution, which could go beyond the micrometre resolution imaging currently available.

A revolution is occurring in the world of micro- and nano-electronics and new challenges such as miniaturisation, power consumption, power density and processing speed need to be tackled. EMRP project 'Traceable characterisation of nanostructured devices' aimed to develop traceable measurements and characterisation of the physical and chemical properties of the next generation of integrated nanostructured devices with sub 30 nm dimensions using novel 3D architectures.

Currently, one of the major challenges in the pharmaceutical industry is the measurement of the intracellular drug concentration. This powerful new instrument could help identify where drugs go at the cellular level. If anomalies were spotted earlier it might help to explain toxicities or the lack of efficacy of a medicine and reduce costly late-stage failures.