Company

Imagen Therapeutics is located at Citylabs on the Central Manchester Hospitals complex just south of the City Centre.

We operate from Class II compliant laboratories with state-of-the-art equipment.

Our test involves the complex interaction of three main components:

1. A dosing robot.
2. An automated fluorescence microscope (High Content Analysis)
3. A software platform to manage the entire process.

Our dosing robot (Hamilton) is one of the leading such machines on the market. It can rapidly and reliably add 56 different chemotherapies at multiple doses to multiple microtitre plates. Using the dosing robot we are able to process many plates an hour, without the risk of human error.

For High Content Analysis we use an Arrayscan™ VTI (Thermo Scientific™). It can automatically count 1000s of cells and determine their viability and morphology in minutes – something that a manual operator simply cannot do quickly or reliably enough to produce the amount of data that is required for each individual patient.

Our workflow is the result of several years of work spent combining individual components in such a way to ensure our test gives the most accurate information on the most number of chemotherapies in the market.

For more information on our technology and service, click here.

Some of the unique features of our service include:

• An almost completely automated workflow, from the time a sample arrives in our lab to the production of the final test results
• Our own proprietary software (ChemoWizard^TM) which produces ordered workbooks that give a complete audit trail from raw assay data through to the final conclusions of which drugs appear to be effective for which patient
• Advanced fluorescence microscopy that allows us to conduct the assay in 3D when the need arises
• Our own patented tissue culture methods designed to create as much similarity to in vivo conditions as possible.

Scanning thousands of cells produces large quantities of data. Our system condenses the results into a relatively simple “heat-map”, which indicates using a 2-colour coding system the drugs that each cancer is most likely to be sensitive to.

For more information on the reporting procedure, and to see an example of our heat-map, click here.