In March 2007 the winners of the GE Healthcare’s IN Cell Analyzer Image Competition 2006 were taken to New York to see their images displayed on AQUOS, the world’s largest high definition TV screen, located in Times Square.

The IN Cell Analyzer System is part of GE Healthcare's commitment to cellular analysis. It is an automated cellular imager, which is helping elucidate understanding of disease at the molecular level and helping to produce safe drugs more quickly.
 
With the IN Cell Analyzer, assays are performed directly inside cells. Automated imaging and sophisticated image analysis techniques provide quantitative results for those assays for each individual cell. The power of the IN Cell Analyzer comes from using the high throughput it delivers to analyze thousands of cells under different conditions to generate statistically robust data.  For the researcher this means that they can run more replicates, include more controls and analyze far more cellular events than would be feasible using traditional approaches.

The IN Cell Image Competition came about because it gives GE Healthcare the chance to promote the excellent quality of the images generated by the IN Cell Analyzer by letting the images speak for themselves.
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On this page you can view the images that were entered, including the award-winning images. GE Healthcare’s sister business NBC has entered into a co-marketing initiative with Sharp in Times Square - AQUOS, the world's largest high definition TV screen. This presented the opportunity to highlight leading cellular research in a very public arena.

The winning images: from Evelyn Griffin (Scripps Florida) and Carmen Laethem (Aerie Pharmaceuticals) had been chosen at the CHI conference in San Francisco in January.  The winners spent a weekend in New York and in addition to seeing their images on the AQUOS screen, were presented with digital photograph frames showing the image presentation and were hosted for a celebratory dinner in downtown NY. The event sparked considerable interest from passers by, who stopped to try to understand what they were looking at. It was a completely new type of imagery for Times Square!  

Evelyn Griffin’s winning image shows an assay used to develop potential cancer therapy drugs by visualizing changes in cellular projections known as ‘podosomes’ following drug treatment.  Evelyn is a research assistant at Scripps.  She does high content imaging as well as other cell biology techniques for the department of Drug Discovery.“ As a result of this assay,” said Evelyn, “we have several promising drug candidates that have progressed to the next stage of drug development, which involves a multi-leveled analysis of drug-inhibited tumor growth and metastasis.”

Carmen Laethem’s winning image is of a cellular assay designed to find new drugs targeted at reducing elevated eye pressure associated with Glaucoma.  “I enjoy using the IN Cell Analyzer because its operation and analysis programs are user-friendly,” said Carmen.  “Imaging allows us to view the cells themselves and not rely only on a biochemical measure of activity.  We can put real numbers to structural changes in the cells, something that had been previously done only by eye.  It’s allowed us to analyze hundreds of compounds in less time than we could analyze only a few manually.”

You can learn more about GE Healthcare at: www.gehealthcare.com.