PALO ALTO, Calif.– Inscopix, Inc., a neuroscience company helping decode the brain for tomorrow’s treatments, announced that it has launched a new application for its miniscope-based platforms to investigate neuronal activity and blood flow simultaneously, a novel research method that may prove critical to studying neurovascular dynamics in the context of aging, dementia, stroke and other debilitating diseases.
The update to Inscopix’s flagship product, the nVue™ System, now enables longitudinal dual color imaging and analysis of neural activity and blood flow in freely-behaving subjects. Researchers will now be able to correlate hemodynamics and neural activity over time to gain new insights into neurovascular abnormalities that underlie so many major neurological diseases in especially aging populations.
“Today with the expansion of our platform to image cerebral hemodynamics, we are becoming an in vivo brain imaging company, enabling the visualization and analysis of both neural dynamics and blood flow during free behavior,” said Kunal Ghosh, Ph.D., CEO of Inscopix. “While fMRI and related approaches provide readouts of whole brain activity based on changes in blood flow, Inscopix will now allow researchers to literally link neural activity to hemodynamic responses, at millisecond temporal resolution and micron-scale spatial resolution.”
It is well established that neurovascular dysfunction, blood–brain barrier (BBB) leakage, and persistent vascular- and neuro-inflammation are among the critical events that eventually lead to neurodegeneration. With the Inscopix platform now able to perform blood flow and neuronal imaging studies simultaneously within deep brain regions over months, researchers will have unprecedented access to study the underpinnings of neurodegenerative and neurological disorders.
“Neuroscientists need to study the relationship between neural circuits and blood flow during natural behavior, which is very challenging with current methods,” said David Gray, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer of Inscopix. “Blood flow imaging on the Inscopix platform makes this possible and will greatly enable the discovery and development of more effective treatments for brain-related disorders.”
Inscopix’s technology is already in use by basic and translational researchers in both academia and pharma in more than 600 labs that have produced almost 200 publications describing many breakthrough discoveries about brain function and disorders. By uncovering the connections between neurons, the company and its collaborators are able to gain insights into directly actionable targets for therapeutic intervention to treat brain-related diseases.
