New top-secret technology dubbed Google Maps for the body is leading to better treatments for diseases for bone diseases, thanks to imaging technology that can zoom into the human body down to the level of a single cell.
Led by University of New South Wales (UNSW) scientist Professor Melissa Knothe Tate, the project is using the Google Imaging technology to explore osteoporosis and osteoarthritis.
Professor Knothe Tate likened using the technology to zoom into the hipbone to Google Maps’s ability to zoom down from an Earth view to street view.
“Just as you would with Google Maps,” she said.
“These are terabyte-sized data sets so the Google maps algorithms are helping us take this tremendous amount of information and use it effectively.
“They’re the traffic controllers, if you like.
“Advanced research instrumentation provides a technological platform to answer the hardest unanswered questions in science, opening up avenues for fundamental discoveries, the implications of which may be currently unfathomable yet which will ultimately pave the way to engineer better human health and quality of life as we age.”
The project — the result of a collaboration between UNSW, the US-based Cleveland Clinic, Brown and Stanford Universities, German optical and industrial measurement manufacturer Zeiss and Google — is being presented as a game-changer for medicine.
An engineer and expert in cell biology and regenerative medicine, Professor Knothe Tate said the technology meant analyses that would once have taken 25 years to complete can now be done in a matter of weeks.
She is the first to use the system in humans. Developed by manufacturer Zeiss, it was originally used to scan silicon wafers for defects.
Technology exploring movement of molecules
Her team is also using cutting-edge microtome and MRI technology to examine how movement and weight bearing affects the movement of molecules within joints, exploring the relationship between blood, bone, lymphatics and muscle.
“For the first time we have the ability to go from the whole body down to how the cells are getting their nutrition and how this is all connected,” Professor Knothe Tate said.
“This could open the door to as-yet-unknown new therapies and preventions.”
Professor Knothe Tate and the international collaboration are currently crunching terabytes of data gathered from human hip studies.
She presented several papers on her research into the human hip and osteoarthritis at the peer-reviewed Orthopaedic Research Society meeting in Las Vegas.
Numerous studies have explored molecular transport within specific tissues but there has been little research on exchange between different kinds of tissue such as cartilage and bone.
Professor Knothe Tate has already demonstrated a link between molecular transport through blood, muscle and bone, and disease status in osteoarthritic guinea pigs.
Like humans, guinea pigs develop osteoarthritis as they age and the condition is increasingly believed to be the result of a breakdown in cellular communication.
She said understanding the molecular signalling and traffic between tissues could unlock a range of treatments, including physical therapies and preventative exercise routines.
Critical to this work has been the development of microscopy that allows seamless imaging of organs at the whole-joint level down to nanometer-sized molecules as well as the capacity to sift and analyse huge sets of data.