Inscopix today announced a collaboration with Bruker Corporation (NASDAQ: BRKR) for its new Multimodal Image Registration and Analysis (MIRA) platform.
Inscopix notes the platform and the collaboration will empower brain researchers to catalyze a more precise and comprehensive mechanistic understanding of the brain by seamlessly integrating one-photon imaging of neuronal activity using Inscopix’s miniature microscope-based nVistaTM and nVokeTM systems, with high-resolution and multi-color imaging of diverse cell-types and pathologies in the brain via Bruker’s Ultima multiphoton microscopes.
“We are very excited to announce the launch of the MIRA platform and the collaboration with Bruker, a leader in multiphoton imaging-based applications for neuroscience,” said Kunal Ghosh, Ph.D., CEO and founder of Inscopix. “This partnership with Bruker is a key part of our strategy to work with partners in the neuroscience imaging industry to help researchers record, align, register and correlate changes in neural activity in a defined population of neurons with changes in other brain cell-types and pathologies.”
“Inscopix’s MIRA platform is an important innovation that will, when used in conjunction with our Ultima multiphoton microscopy, combine the many advantages of one-photon and multiphoton imaging, while overcoming previous technological limitations, for a richer and more sophisticated understanding of the brain,” added Xiaomei Li, Ph.D., VP, and GM of Bruker’s Fluorescence Microscopy Business. “We are always seeking out important collaborations with technological leaders, such as Inscopix, to help make functional brain imaging more routine and widespread in the neuroscience research community.”
The MIRA platform is designed such that researchers can first image large-scale brain activity at single-cell resolution in freely-behaving animal subjects, an important benefit of Inscopix. Then, researchers can image the same field-of-view in the brain with multiphoton and confocal microscopes at higher resolution and at multiple wavelengths, an important advantage of Bruker, but which requires animal immobilization. The MIRA platform thus allows researchers to gain greater insights from cells of interest through dual-color imaging and the ability to compare calcium activity between freely-behaving and head-fixed conditions by providing a solution for co-registering cells from both modalities.
The companies will be co-marketing the Inscopix MIRA platform with Bruker’s multiphoton microscopes. The combined solution includes an adapter to integrate Inscopix miniscope data from freely-moving animals with multicolor laser scanning microscope data from the head-fixed animals, along with an Inscopix-developed software solution to streamline co-registering of images obtained from both modalities.