Time is money, especially in the race to discover new anti-inflammatory drugs and bring them to market.
Pharmaceutical companies typically spend years in the pre-clinical stage of the drug development process, incurring millions of dollars in costs.
New medications for diseases such as heart disease, stroke, arthritis and multiple sclerosis could improve treatment for millions of people. Yet a key part of the discovery process — monitoring the movement and speed of white blood cells in living tissue — involves hours of tedious and often inherently flawed handwork.
CellTrek, cell-tracking software developed by a team of U.Va. School of Engineering and Applied Science researchers, jump-starts the current tracking method to provide an automated solution to a fundamental problem: how to track thousands of fast-moving, often obscured, cells in the demanding in vivo, or living, environment. CellTrek essentially cuts through the "noise" surrounding white blood cells, also known as leukocytes, so researchers can collect rapid, accurate data they can use to describe the intensity of the inflammatory process.
"The velocity and the density of these cells are critical indicators of the level of inflammation," explained Scott Acton, one of CellTrek's developers and a professor of electrical and computer engineering. "Nuances in the different distributions of the velocities [can] actually indicate different things to the biologist. One thing might be to evaluate a genetic deficiency, or the presence of some gene, or the presence of a drug that's supposed to be anti-inflammatory or maybe even pro-inflammatory, so in order to investigate all these hypotheses regarding the inflammation process in the microvasculature [small blood vessels], you have to be able to count and track cells, the leucocytes, in vivo."
Acton, whose expertise lies in image analysis techniques such as image segmentation and motion tracking, had specialized in following the movements of military targets — large objects such as vehicles and tanks. In 2000, a chance meeting with Dr. Klaus Ley, a professor of biomedical engineering, led to a new focus on objects at the cellular level. Ley, recently named director of the division of inflammation biology at the La Jolla (Calif.) Institute for Allergy & Immunology, is an expert in the biomechanics of the inflammation process in living tissue.
"When Scott came to U.Va. several years ago as an associate professor, I went to his talk because it was about tracking and I was interested in tracking [leukocytes] and had tried many different algorithms with different engineers," Ley recalled. "He had tracked cyclists at the Tour de France … from a helicopter. The helicopter moved. The cyclists moved and sometimes the cyclists would disappear into a little forest and would come out the other end and he would still be able to track them. I thought, 'Well, if he can track this stuff, he sure can track these cells.'
"He solved the problem of tracking unlabeled leukocytes in living tissue. Nobody had done that before."