ART's new generation Optix MX3 optical molecular imaging system unveiled

Sep 23 2009

ART Advanced Research Technologies Inc. ("ART") (TSX:ARA), a Canadian medical device company and a leader in optical molecular imaging products for the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, today unveiled a new generation of its optical molecular imaging system, called Optix^® MX3, at the Industry Workshop opening event of the World Molecular Imaging Congress. The event is being held this year in Montreal, Canada, from September 23 to 26. ART is also featuring the Optix^® MX3, as well as its SoftScan^® and Fenestra^® product offering, as an exhibitor at the event (booth #301), in the Exhibit Hall of the Palais des congres de Montreal.

"The Optix MX3 addresses a real market need as customers in the drug discovery and development process continue to demand tools providing an extensive qualitative and quantitative data set in small animal research, while ensuring reliability and performance for applications requiring longitudinal studies," said Sebastien Gignac, Chairman & CEO of ART. "While products currently on the market can only detect the intensity of the signal coming from a mouse specimen, the Optix MX3 system quite effectively exploits the power of our time domain technology to move beyond this type of signal measurement to obtain much richer and complex data. Indeed, with our Optix MX3, scientists are actually able to gain confidence in the exactitude of their results, by accurately differentiating various compound types and determining their concentration and depth precisely."

"We are excited to announce that the Optix MX3 is now available through our dedicated sales teams in North America and Europe, as well as our regional distribution partners in Italy, India, Japan, Korea and the United Kingdom," said Dino DiCamillo, Vice President, Global Sales & Marketing, of ART.

The compact Optix MX3 system offers the highest sensitivity among fluorescent systems in the preclinical market and unique optical molecular imaging features. The completely re-engineered and redesigned Optix platform will mean an increase in performance level, entail savings in manufacturing costs, and will incorporate new technological market drivers, such as the ability to image red fluorescent proteins, Q-dots, and the complete spectrum ranging from 450 nm to 850 nm with the support of a state-of-the-art tunable laser.

Using ART's proven and proprietary time-domain technology, which allows measurement of the light's time of arrival, Optix MX3 is sensitive enough to detect target signals deep within the organs of small animals. Unique to the Optix MX3 is the ability to recover fluorescence lifetime, which can be used to separate and quantify fluorescent probe distributions depending on their respective biochemical environment. Also part of the Optix MX3 is the CT fusion software package allowing researchers to export the scan obtained using Optix MX3 in DICOM format, and fuse it with micro-CT for a full 3D anatomical reference.

www.art.ca