Nordic Life Science 1
BUSINESS PRESENTATION MILTENYI BIOTEC How does th
is compare to Light sheet imaging of an adult mouse liver stained for CK7 (green) which labels the bile ducts and alpha Smooth Muscle Actin (red) which labels the vasculature. A DVER T OR I A L Gubra is a privately-held biotech company with two primary areas of business: pre-clinical contract research (CRO) services, and proprietary early target and drug discovery programs. Focusing on the metabolic space and specializing in in vivo pharmacology, peptide chemistry, molecular pharmacology, histology, imaging, stereology, next generation sequencing, bioinformatics, and ex vivo assays, Gubra has quickly established itself as a professional and competent partner worldwide within big pharma, biotech, and academia, through a relentless focus on high quality, scientific excellence, speed, and solid teamwork. We touched base with Jacob Hecksher-Sørensen, Gubra’s principal scientist in imaging innovation. How did you come to work with Miltenyi Biotec? In addition to our CRO services, we do a lot of internal research where we aim to develop novel therapeutics or technologies that will advance drug discovery. Building up quantitative 3D imaging using light-sheet microscopy falls under the latter category. For that, we’ve been making much use of the UltraMicroscope II. What do you use the UltraMicroscope II for? We’re mainly studying mouse samples, and a prerequisite for everything we do is that we have the ability to scan whole organs. That’s obvious when studying the brain but it’s true for other organs too; if you’re looking into diabetes you need a very precise view of the pancreas, and locating all of the islets of Langerhans individually is impractical since they’re spread all over the pancreas. It’s very similar to the situation when you study cancer; depending on how you cut the tissue, you might completely miss the tumor! other academic/industrial work in this area? Traditionally, we think of imaging as either high resolution or high throughput. Getting both simultaneously is very hard; it might take an entire day to image a single whole-brain in high detail. That’s frustrating but workable in academia, where you might be looking to focus in minute detail on a few rodent brains, but we need both single cell-level detail and high throughput because we’re looking for better statistical information. So either we perform IHC stainings or we look at the distribution of a given drug inside the animals. The latter is really informative. The results are similar to those gained via PET, except you can also identify the types of cell you’re hitting with the drug under review. You can co-stain, laser capture, and really see what the cells are expressing, which gives you a much better idea of how your drug works. Why the UltraMicroscope II? We actually have two of them, and before that we used the original UltraMicroscope. Personally, I’ve been working with light sheet (LS) microscopes since 2011 and back in the day with optical prediction tomography, which I think was the first technology capable of imaging whole organs. We switched to LS because the x–y frame resolution is better and also offered greater speed and ease of use. Of all the LS technology hitting the market at the time, the UltraMicroscope was obvious for us because the sample chamber capacity would fit a whole mouse organ, such as the brain. So what gets you out of bed in the mornings? Two things: first, is the knowledge that we are developing a quantifiable imaging process that is very useful for new drug development. I love developing our technology and, both in concept and as we begin to realize design, seeing its huge potential, and helping to make that potential a reality. Second is quite simply seeing the difference we make through our work. It is very satisfying to see a drug that you worked on being approved and actually helping patients. NLS