Professor Emmet Mc Cormack from University of Bergen (UiB) heads a research team focused on preclinical drug development in immunology and cell-based therapies. His work with time-domain fluorescence imaging demonstrates improved precision over conventional methods, enhancing targeted fluorescence and depth assessment.
We have interviewed him about his involvement in the CoDaFlight project and the achievements he and his group want to reach.
Hi, my name is Emmet McCormack and I’m a professor of pharmaceutics at the University of Bergen in Norway. I have a research group of a diverse set of researchers who are working primarily on preclinical drug development particularly in the areas of immunology and cell-based therapies where we have developed innovative preclinical animal models and use imaging modalities to be able to determine efficacy of new drugs and new cell therapy concepts.
How did you get involved in CoDaFlight?
I came into this project based on a history of actually using time domain fluorescence imaging in preclinical animal modeling primarily from a macroscopic imaging perspective and from this I could see that time domain had many advantages over conventional fluorescence imaging modalities. Not only could we get obviously the target fluorescence with a targeted fluorophore but it was very easy with the time domain function to be able to delineate background auto-fluorescence and background non-targeted fluorescence from our targeted probe accumulation in tumors and even with the time domain function once we are given the absorption and scattering characteristics of a tissue we could even tell how deep down that lesion was within a mouse. So overall time domain I could see from has many advantages over conventional imaging modalities and maybe even in comparison to bioluminescence.
What would you like to achieve within the project?
As a group working very much so in the preclinical setting we are always looking for ways to improve ethics within our work and in particular we are very interested in moving from mice model-based preclinical modeling to using the comparative
animal model that is treating pet animals and pet dogs as patients and using the results from these and translating them into the clinical trial setting for humans. We’re very interested in particular in ovarian cancer and one of the main things that we would like to achieve with this project would be translation of time domain based fluorescence image surgery into the clinical setting in ovarian cancer.