For years now, the importance of preclinical imaging for drug discovery has been stressed. Pharmaceuticals and CROs are under pressure to streamline the discovery and development phases of drug development, and imaging is invaluable in this regard. In addition, imaging has become an important part of clinical trials; so, focusing on imaging during preclinical development allows for the best imaging biomarkers to be discovered and validated earlier, leading to cost savings when the clinical stage is reached.
There are other important roles for preclinical imaging, however. One of these is the development of new clinical techniques. Yesterday, I read an interesting article describing a potentially new technique for treating cardiac arrhythmia . Micro CT images acquired by Mark Riccio and company at Cornell , using an eXplore CT-120 played an important role in this research (check out the supplementary information and a summary article at Science/AAAS for some images). This is just one exciting example of the usefulness of preclinical imaging in the development of clinical treatments.
Comments