Electron microscopy project to assist pre-clinical trials.

A new £30m electron microscopy project, led by the Rosalind Franklin Institute and including Thermo Fisher Scientific, will develop technology designed to create 3D images of cells at very high resolution, to facilitate researchers to see how a particular drug works within a patient at a cellular level, before it reaches clinical trials.
The technology is based on cryogenic electron tomography, which builds up a 3D image by stitching together multiple 2D images of samples that have been flash frozen at less than -180oC. Precise techniques will need to be developed for preparing and handling samples of human tissue, and new electron microscopy techniques will need to be designed to speed up the imaging process and collect the huge amounts of data. The team will collaborate with the Electron Bio-Imaging Centre at Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire to design machine learning technology to process the data.
Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, Professor James Naismith, said: “In this large volume technique, we can go further than current technology allows, creating images of whole cells, and cells in tissues. These cell-to-cell interfaces are where a lot of incredibly important biology happens, where drugs are taken into cells, and where cells communicate, sending and receiving signals. The large volume allows us the potential to use patients’ samples, and see for the first time the molecular effect of a drug in a cell patient-by-patient. This could be really important for patients whose diseases are caused by misfolded proteins. There are drugs called chaperones which can help them fold correctly, and this technique would allow a doctor to check that the protein was being fixed.”