Dr Alex Corbett awarded Royal Society Fellowship

Dr Alex Corbett, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, has been awarded a two-year fellowship to develop a new type of high throughput imaging system.

The “MultiScope” enables microscopic images to be acquired in rapid succession from individual wells of an industry standard microtiter well plate. Images of the cells or tissues being cultured in the wells will be used to quantify their response to new drug candidates.

The vast number of new drug candidates being proposed each year far exceeds current capacity to measure their efficacy on cells and tissues, creating an imaging bottleneck in the drug discovery process. A commercially available MultiScope would look to remove this constraint.

The fellowship will be undertaken in collaboration with Cairn Research Limited (based in Faversham, UK) which has more than 40 years’ experience in the manufacture of scientific instrumentation and is well known within the microscopy community. Cairn Research have emphasised their confidence in the MultiScope by licencing the technology developed in Dr Corbett’s group from the University of Exeter.

The Royal Society established the Industry Fellowship to enable the exchange of ideas and talent between academia and industry.

Dr Corbett said: “I am delighted to be awarded the Royal Society Industry fellowship to work with the experienced team at Cairn Research. The MultiScope’s unique approach to parallelised imaging could significantly accelerate drug discovery. Making the technology commercially available is the first step in that process”.

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