Professor Kim Jeong Hun
Professor KIM Jeong Hun (Department of Ophthalmology, College of Medicine) and LEE Tae Geol (Center for Nano-Bio Measurement, Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science Daejeon) have measured the capacitance (the ability of a body to store an electrical charge) of endothelial cells that construct blood vessels and monitored the decreasing effect of vascular permeability when medicine is injected in real time.
Until now, to see how a medicine affected cells or proteins it was necessary for the target protein that constructs a cell to be marked with fluorescent materials and observed by fluorescence microscopes. Moreover, it usually took about 2 or 3 days after injection to see the effects of medicine and was hard to analyze quantitatively due to the inaccuracy of human eyes through microscopes.
With this new technology, however, by incubating multiple cells of the same type simultaneously and monitoring electrical charges of cells in real time, it is possible to increase the effectiveness of medicine and experiment with multiple medicines on a single target cell. The research team plans to increase the number of incubating facilities to accelerate determination of the best medications and dosages to administer as well.
Professor KIM and Dr. LEE said, “Now, it is possible to see how a medicine works before applying it to human beings through our technology. We expect that it will be utilized in many areas including for the treatment of brain diseases.”
- The details of this development were published online in the June 2015 issue of the journal Nature Scientific Reports (http://www.nature.com/articles/srep11014)
- SNU College of Medicine: http://medicine.snu.ac.kr/