IRVINE, Calif., April 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Approximately 150,000 babies in the United States are born each year with birth defects stemming from such factors as genetic aberrations, environmental influences, and exposure to drugs or chemicals. The defects range in severity from mild to lethal, with abnormalities affecting structure, function, metabolism or combinations of these properties. The pre-clinical evaluation of birth defects is an essential aspect of drug development, functional genomics, and environmental safety.
Researchers at the Children’s Cancer Research Institute (CCRI) of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio have developed Virtual Histology, a new imaging technology that fills an important need in the identification and evaluation of birth defects in animal models of embryo toxicity. According to Charles Keller, M.D., a principal investigator in developmental cancer genetics and therapeutics at CCRI, “Virtual Histology will allow quantitative, high-resolution, three-dimensional microCT scans of intact embryos. Images and data generated by these scans will provide valuable insight into the effects of teratogenic influences on embryonic development. This knowledge is critical to developing strategies aimed at preventing birth defects.”
Virtual Histology is featured as the cover story in the April 28th issue of PLoS Genetics, a peer reviewed, open-access journal published by the Public Library of Science (www.plosgenetics.org). The full article is freely available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.0020061.
Numira Biosciences, the licensee of the technology, plans to make Virtual Histology available to researchers through the sale of kits and imaging services. “We’re excited about the pending market launch of this exciting tool aimed at research programs in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries,” said Numira’s CEO, Michael Beeuwsaert. “Virtual Histology represents a vast improvement in resolution, time, and expense compared to current methods and approaches for studying developmental defects in animal models. Moreover, the datasets generated by Virtual Histology will facilitate the use of computational methods for organ patterning analysis.”
Dr. Keller added that, “Virtual Histology will be available at an exciting time, coinciding with the recently-announced effort by the National Institutes of Health to ‘knock out’ every one of the 25,000 genes of the mouse. Applying the quantitative, high throughput, methods of Virtual Histology to this emerging dataset will undoubtedly have implications to our understanding, at resolutions which are better than one-tenth the thickness of a human hair, of how each gene influences skeleton and organ development.”
About Numira Biosciences
Numira Biosciences is a specialty R&D tools company focused on leveraging advances in genetics and in-vivo molecular imaging to create a catalog of novel, high-value products that will provide researchers with unprecedented insight into genomics, developmental biology, mechanisms of disease, drug efficacy, and toxicity. Numira has acquired the exclusive, worldwide rights to several groundbreaking technologies and is planning to initiate product sales this year. For more information, visit www.numirabio.com.
Numira Biosciences
CONTACT: Michael Beeuwsaert, President & CEO of Numira Biosciences Inc.,+1-949-623-8603, mbeeuwsaert@numirabio.com
