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Biological Microscopes—Perfect Focus System—An Advanced Inverted Research Microscope That Speeds New Drug Discovery and Development

1. New drug development requires a huge amount of money and time


Medicines are vital to our healthy lives.

We rely on drugs and medicines to provide remedies when we get sick. To combat malignant neoplasms (cancer), we require anticancer agents. Likewise, to prevent the spread of flu, we use vaccines and other medicines. Medicines are critical for us to live healthier and better lives.

In the development of new medicines, candidate drugs must undergo rigorous tests for efficacy and safety prior to human clinical testing. At pharmaceutical companies, thousands of new candidate drugs are routinely tested to check their influences on pathogens and the human body. This process, however, requires a huge investment of time and money.

Generally, it takes 10 to 15 years to develop one particular drug, and it is not rare that R&D expenditures exceed 10 billion yen.

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2. Minimizing stress on live cells to achieve highly precise observations

Selection of candidate drug, preliminary clinical tests (approx. 3-5 years), clinical tests (approx. 3-7 years), application and approval
Outline of new drug development processes

New drugs must go through numerous and rigorous processes before they are finally commercialized. Today, live cells in culture are used more in the initial efficacy and toxicology safety testing than in once-predominant biochemical tests used in the past. The use of live cells in toxicity tests to lessen the use of laboratory animals is also on the rise, reducing costs and speeding time to market.

An effective method in live cell tests is to observe how a target live cell changes and metabolically responds over a period of several days after a candidate drug has been applied to it.

However, because a live cell is extremely sensitive, even slight stress—such as the intrusive focusing illumination of a microscope—deteriorates the cell's activities, making it extremely difficult to observe its changes over a long period of time. Also, even with experienced research staff, adjustment of a microscope and observation over long hours is a very grueling procedure.

Wouldn't it be possible to develop a practical and easy to use system that could successfully reduce this extra burden on live cells and make the documentation process required of researchers much more efficient? A unique solution that Nikon has come up with is the "Perfect Focus System" (PFS).

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3. Contributing to research of life

The Perfect Focus System (PFS) is a system that automatically maintains focus so that the point of interest within a specimen is always kept in sharp focus no matter what mechanical or thermal changes take place. PFS detects the position of the target specimen using LED light in the infrared range that is emitted through the objective lens of a microscope.


How PFS Works

The ECLIPSE Ti series Inverted Research Microscope is an optical research microscope designed to observe, capture images and analyze live cells. Not only have critical operations of the microscope been motorized so that operators can perform precise microscope control smoothly, but the microscope has also been equipped with PFS that solves problems associated with time-lapse observation*1.

PFS corrects for focus deviations during multipoint (multiple cell location) observations over long periods of time or focus shifts*2 when reagents or drugs are applied, enabling accurate tracking of dynamic cellular events taking place within a specimen over many hours and days. Because PFS also shortens the adjustment cycle time before observation, damage to the specimen by phototoxic illumination light is greatly reduced—a big advantage especially in live cell observation.

Researchers can now concentrate on their research as they are freed from focus adjustment operations—one of the most cumbersome of microscopy operations required for accurate image data analysis. PFS also reduces the chance of the operator overlooking minute specimen reactions and omitting imaging of important events. Automation of focus adjustment in a research microscope is a technology critical to the development of life science cellular research.

  • *1 Time-lapse observation refers to a microscopy method by which live cells are observed at regular intervals over a long period of time.
  • *2 Focus shift denotes a focus deviation that is caused by a slight change in ambient temperature or refractive index.