Researchers at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, Oxford, are using Chip-Man Technologies’ Cell-IQ platform to study multipotent live cells during differentiation. The Institute is a world leader in translational medical research and, in this project, the Molecular Haematology Unit is attempting to understand the signalling pathways involved in haematopoiesis.
The Cell-IQ system is a fully integrated continuous live cell imaging and analysis platform that can be trained to quantify results automatically. Dr Francisco Iborra (pictured) explained how the Cell-IQ platform fits into his group’s research: “Chip-Man Technologies first demonstrated the system in my laboratory three years ago, and we have been using it for our live cell work ever since.
The company is very involved with its customers and has provided very good support. The very low phototoxicity achieved by the Cell-IQ is essential to our work, allowing individual cells to be tracked for up to 10 days. Previous technologies only allowed study of cells for up to 48 hours, after which phototoxic cell death occurred; however, with the Cell-IQ platform, we only have to stop due to cell confluency.
“We also use the system for drug screening to identify compounds that affect, for example, the formation of aneuploid or multinucleated cells. The flexibility of the platform allows us to conduct these studies over a wide range of concentrations simultaneously using 96-well microplates, which speeds up our research.”
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