IDEA Bio-Medical Sells HTS/HCS Cell Imaging System to The Medical University of South Carolina

“Our goal was to develop a cell-imaging system that would really bring down the cost of biomedical and pharmaceutical R&D and reduce the time and improve the output of drug discovery processes. It had to combine High Throughput with High Content, to be very competitively priced, and to be easy enough for researchers at all levels to use,” said Shlomo Turgeman, CEO of IDEA Bio-Medical. The company offers a base system that meets most research needs, and an additional set of modular packages like Live Cell, Object Mapping, and more.

Hermes WiScan® fits into the university’s focus on innovative research and use of advanced technologies and creative ideas to achieve its goals and its mission. “We own larger and more expensive systems, but they are difficult to use and don’t meet all of our needs. Hermes is about the size of a large printer, processes information with incredible speed, and performs a wide variety of cell-based experiments that meet our overall research needs,” said Patrick M. Woster, who is the South Carolina SmartState™ Endowed Chair for Drug Discovery at MUSC and Director of the Drug Design and Synthesis core facility.

WiScan® technology originated at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science and at IDEA Bio-Medical’s parent company IDEA Machine Development, and was further developed by IDEA Bio-Medical as part of a commercialization agreement with YEDA – the Institute’s technology transfer arm. The result was a revolutionary High-Definition, Automated Cell Imaging systems called WiScan® and an Image Analysis Platform called WiSoft®. WiScan®, comprised of two products: Hermes and Argus, combines two screening strategies: High Content, and High Throughput. Together with WiSoft®, the system provides an advanced rapid harvesting tool for complex biomedical information from primary and secondary screens and shows major improvements of up to 20 times in screening rates and screening set-up.