Password Magazine - Issue 21: Healthcare
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The exciting new science of molecular medicine, which focuses on the molecular processes underlying disease, offers tremendous potential for early detection and diagnosis of medical conditions. It also provides what many clinicians see as the ‘holy grail’ of therapy assessment – a quantitative, explicit measure of a therapeutic drug’s effectiveness, allowing for more targeted, more effective therapy. Although still in its infancy, this new branch of medicine is developing rapidly thanks to major advances in medical imaging by companies such as Philips.
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Useful links+ Molecular Imaging website of Philips Medical Systems |
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Molecular medicine describes a generalized molecular approach to screening and assessment, diagnosis, disease tracking and treatment. It encompasses a whole range of techniques that make use of molecules tagged with a contrast agent and which bind to target molecules in the body. The target molecules are keyed in some way to a specific cellular activity or disease process and the contrast medium carried by the molecular agents allows biochemical processes, including the presence and extent of disease, to be visualized and even quantified using conventional imaging techniques. If bound to a drug, molecular agents can provide targeted therapy.
Major developments in molecular medicine in recent years have provided a much deeper understanding of the underlying molecular mechanisms controlling disease. In particular, advances in molecular target identification have led to the development of new contrast agents and targeted drugs. Moreover on the imaging front, resolution is constantly improving in virtually all imaging modalities with some systems already achieving microscopic-resolution capabilities and sensitivities that would have been unattainable only a few years ago. |
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One of the major focuses of Philips’ new Molecular Imaging business unit is the development of equipment to support the R&D chain from development of targeted contrast agents and drugs in the laboratory, through pre-clinical animal trials towards early clinical human trials. Philips now offers researchers in this field specially-developed animal-imaging equipment including Optical Imaging, PET, CT, MRI with dedicated animal coils, and animal probes for ultrasound. Many of these systems are based on the same back-ends as the company’s established clinical-imaging systems. They therefore offer the important advantage of allowing protocols developed during pre-clinical animal-testing phases to be transferred directly to the clinical testing phases, saving time and costs in drug and contrast agent development. This is in marked contrast to current specialized animal-testing equipment in which transfer from pre-clinical to clinical trails requires the time-consuming development of completely new protocols for testing on humans. |
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New biosensors for molecular diagnostics Philips Research is investigating a new biosensor technology based on magneto-resistive sensors that promises to radically improve the speed, sensitivity and reliability of biomolecular diagnostics for applications such as protein and pathogen monitoring, near-patient testing in medical centers (blood, urine, saliva tests etc.), and ultimately home testing by individuals. Philips’ biosensor measures the magnetic field created by magnetic nano-particles that bind to target molecules in a biological assay. Compared with optical sensing methods, the use of magnetic nano-particles not only eliminates the additional steps required to bind optical labels to the target molecules, it also results in biosensors that are up to a hundred times more sensitive than existing devices.
Philips’ next step in the development of such systems is to demonstrate dose-response curves for relevant biological molecules and the company expects the technology could be ready for industrialization in about four to six years. |
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For more information
Principal Scientist at Philips Research Hamburg, Germany E-mail: tobias.schaeffter@philips.com
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