Image Analysis in Life Sciences - Customer Case Studies

Definiens enables early decision making in pre-clinical study

In a pre-clinical safety study of a new compound, a Definiens’ application identified a clear proliferation of bile ducts in monkey livers indicating potential toxicity. The application automatically took measurements of the size and area of the bile ducts and even the number of nuclei they contained. As a result of the study, ALTANA chose not to proceed with an expensive clinical trial using the compound. Prof. Germann, Head of IPAS, was impressed by the accuracy of the results. “In less than 3% of cases, a bile duct was overlooked or an artifact was incorrectly identified as a bile duct.This level of accuracy was considerably higher than would be expected if pathologists had manually examined the images.”

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Definiens provides effective candidate support

In a pre-clinical safety study, Definiens’ technology automatically measured the height of the fundic and antral mucosa in rat stomachs. The study identified a potentially toxic compound, supporting ALTANA’s ‘no-go’ decision for an expensive clinical trial. “With Definiens, image analysis results are much less dependent on the quality of staining and image acquisition. For large volumes of images the time to completion is reduced enormously coupled with a significant increase in quality and objectivity,” says Dr. Tuch, Head of Toxicological Pathology. ALTANA has adopted Definiens as its image analysis platform for selected pre-clinical safety assessments.

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Definiens is the gold standard in high content analysis

”eCognition is currently the gold standard in high content analysis software,” says Dr. Baines, the Director of Services and Facilities at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics. “In fact, Definiens´ software is now embedded in the IT environment of our institute. Our microscopy facility is using eCognition to extract data from microscopy images and in our screening facility eCognition provides image analysis data from screens.”

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Definiens accelerates safety and efficacy studies

Preclinical pathologists are under enormous pressure to assess the safety profile of drug candidates in order to accelerate FDA approval. “There is a critical need to get more accurate data faster”, says Dr. Elke Persohn, Head of the Cellular Imaging Group at SP&A, Pathology, at Novartis Pharma AG in Basel. “eCognition solved our problem to automatically detect small intestine crypts and count proliferating and non-proliferating cells which was not possible with other software solutions.”

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IMP: Identification of Mitotic activities in live cells

The Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) takes the coordinating lead of a project called MitoCheck where leading European research groups have joined in to screen for genes and proteins crucial for cell division. The first screening of the MitoCheck project, to be performed at the EMBL in Heidelberg, will reveal a comprehensive list of genes whose loss results in blocking mitosis. These genes are then studied further by all partners in this European project to determine their biochemical regulation. “Studying the processes during mitosis means that you must apply live cell microscopy which produces a huge amount of data,” explains Dr. Karin Paiha of the BioOptics Department of the IMP.

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