Facility Optical imaging

About our equipment

Optical imaging offers unique possibilities for in vitro and in vivo imaging applications, especially in the context of molecular imaging.

With the MILabs optical imaging module and the IVIS Lumina imaging system, both present in PRIME, it is possible to identify disease pathways, determine mechanisms of action, evaluate drug compounds, and monitor their effects on disease progression in living animals non-invasively.

Both imaging systems are highly sensitive and can image fluorescent  and/or bioluminescent reporters and probes both in vivo and in vitro. The systems are user friendly and allow rapid (1-10 minutes) quantitative assessment of fluorescence in 3 mice or 1 rat simultaneously. The advantage is that a huge amount of biological tools are commercially available such as transgenic reporter animals, reporter tumor cells, microorganisms , gene reporters, enzymatic cleavable substrates and quantum dots. In-house near infrared fluorescent probes are produced for fluorescence imaging.

Applications in PRIME

The MILabs optical imaging module and the IVIS Lumina in PRIME can be used for the following applications:

• To study the physiological, pathological and molecular processes in real time and longitudinally;
• For diagnostics, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, and drug screening in preclinical studies.

This imaging modules are used in PRIME for:

• Tumor imaging with fluorescence imaging
• Skin infection models
• Wound healing
• Malaria infection/immunization 
• Disease-inducible promoters for inflammation 
• Rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis models 

Optical Imaging unit MILabs

The MILabs OI units can be used for bioluminescence, fluorescence and Cherenkov imaging, and it can even be combined with the MILabs U-SPECT-6/CT at our facility, to do multimodal imaging. Researchers at PRIME use it for a wide variety of applications to answer their research questions, such as ex vivo imaging of luminescent cells seeded in bone disks, in vivo follow-up of tumor growth through luminescence imaging, or in vivo biodistribution of fluorescently labeled compounds.