Vienna, Austria, January 8, 2009 – Insight Pharma Reports has published H.M. Pharma Consultancy's new report on molecular imaging, the enabling integrative technology that is constantly finding new applications in the life science industry. Molecular imaging has proven extremely useful across the entire drug development pipeline, from drug target discovery to routine clinical diagnostics. The technologies employed range from optical proximity assays which visualize the binding of ligands to receptors in living cells to tomography of patients' bodies based on positrons emitted by radioactive tracers.

“A most impressive cutting-edge technology spectrum is being put to work to visualize molecular events of biological relevance in basic biology, transitional research, and advanced routine diagnostics,” said report author Hermann A.M. Mucke. “Molecular imaging can add incredible value to almost any cellular, animal and human research that is conducted today. This is true for academic as well as pharmaceutical investigations.”

As a result of this diversity in several dimensions, there is no single “molecular imaging market.” Rather, there are several partially connected markets: one for optical cellular imaging in R&D, consisting of a market for advanced microscopes and a market for optical probes; a market for near-infrared imaging of laboratory animals, again divided into an equipment and a probe market; a market for tomographic scanners (based on X-rays, magnetic resonance, or nuclear isotopes, alone or in combination, and in different sizes for laboratory animals and humans); a market for ultrasound imaging equipment; those parts of the markets for X-ray, magnetic resonance, and ultrasound contrast agents which concern molecularly or metabolically differentiating agents; and a market for radioactive isotopic probes, assisted by a secondary market for the logistics of those probes that decay particularly rapidly but can only be manufactured in cyclotrons. An overarching market of computer systems and software takes care of the processing, analysis, and storage of the captured images.

H.M. Pharma Consultancy's report investigates all these aspects, along with the technology that constitutes their underpinning, and adds additional information from a survey of molecular imaging researchers. The report, titled “Biomedical Imaging: From Drug Target Discovery to Medical Diagnostics” is available from Insight Pharma Reports, a division of the Cambridge Healthtech Institute. For details on buying the report, please visit Insight Pharma Reports' website at http://www.insightpharmareports.com/reports_report.aspx?id=86248&r=6648 , or call Rose LaRaia at (+1) (781) 972-5444.