Application Brief: Tumor Microenvironment Imaging with Photoacoustic Technology

Pharmaceutical development of therapeutic and imaging agents that improve tumor prognosis is an expensive R&D effort with many compounds in the preclinical testing pipeline (Olafsson et al., 2010). Introducing an efficient way to screen and reject unpromising compounds during the discovery research phase of development, such as in vivo preclinical imaging, could save some of the $800 million in costs required to produce them, since a large portion of the cost is attributed to clinical trial expenditure (Agdeppa and Spilker, 2009).