Monitoring biological response to challenges
ANSTO's research programme "Monitoring Biological Response to Challenge" brings together our capabilities and expertise in radiochemistry, investigations with imaging, and bi-analytics to help understand the pathways from health to disease, which are triggered by environmental factors whether biological, societal or environmental.
Our research focuses on the development and optimisation of radio-tracers and imaging methods to enable the longitudinal monitoring of selected biological pathways and elements during the period of challenge.
These tools are then shared with other researchers in collaborations and partnerships, applying our unique resources to help answer their questions.
Monitoring biological response contributes strongly to research in patho-physiology and therapeutic strategy and to improving patient management in neurosciences, Alzheimer's disease and diabetes.
Our current projects
Radiochemistry team
- Development of automated macro and microfluidic radiochemistry methodologies, both from a safety perspective and for routine applications
- Development of 11C radiotracers for fundamental neuro-transmission systems
Investigations with imaging and bioanalytics teams
- Quantification of whole-body dual-mice with a pre-clinical PET Inveon. Learn more.
- Partial Volume Correction with a de-noising strategy
- Monte Carlo-based based simulator of a pre-clinical PET Inveon system. Learn more.
- Improving biological parameters estimation in pre-clinical longitudinal PET imaging of the rat brain. Learn more.
- Elemental analysis and mapping of brain injury consequences in vitro using micro-PIXE. Learn more.
Our collaborative work
- The contribution of brain inflammation to the development of epilepsy
- Imaging in vivo microglial activation in response to chronic stress. Learn more.
- Developing a radio-tracer for imaging cell apoptosis and stroke using caspase-3 inhibitors