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More than just a microscope: how advanced imaging modalities can take your pharmaceutical research to the next level

When you think of microscopy for drug discovery, you may picture images of fixed cells or histologically stained sections of biopsies, collected long after a drug has taken effect. Instead, imagine watching drug responses in real time in whole living animals, visualising drug delivery vehicles at nanoscale and removing the need to section biopsies altogether. These are just a few of the ways advanced microscopy can make life easier for pharmaceutical researchers.

What is a microscopy tech centre and how do they assist drug discovery research?

We work in a unique shared facility that is completely open access, meaning our tech centre is open to anyone and everyone, regardless of affiliation or experience. Our goal is to provide easy access to multimillion-dollar microscopes that would otherwise be unavailable to a lot of researchers. Our staff are passionate about biophotonics research and want to help disseminate the latest techniques to the greater scientific community. While we are housed within a nanoscience centre, we enable microscopy techniques which can be used for much more than just nanoscience; rather, most of our users are medical and biological researchers doing things like designing new drug delivery vehicles, researching artificial tissue constructs and xenografts, or investigating disease and cancer models in search of new biomarkers for drugs to target.