Celsense Products - V-Sense

Conventional approaches for scoring inflammation in animal tissue, such as histology, often lead to bottlenecks in the therapeutic discovery process. V-Sense is an enabling reagent used to accelerate the detection and quantification of inflammation. It can minimize the use of laborious histological processing and yield accurate, fast quantitative measures of inflammation in intact tissues or in vivo.

V-Sense is a fluorine-based ‘tracer’ agent used in conjunction with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). V-Sense consists of a proprietary nanoemulsion containing tiny perfluorocarbon droplets and is safe for direct intravenous injection into animals. Following injection, the nanoemulsion droplets are taken up by circulating leukocytes. These fluorine-tagged cells can then participate in any inflammatory event in vivo. When labeled cells accumulate at a site of inflammation, they become detectable using fluorine-19 (¹⁹F) NMR in excised tissue (via biopsy or necropsy) or by in vivo MRI. The key advantage of using ¹⁹F detection over MRI is that there is no background signal from the host’s tissues, and only labeled cells are detected. Quantification of the ¹⁹F signal yields a fast, accurate marker of the degree of inflammation present. V-Sense can be used to detect a wide range of lesions and diseases where inflammation is a hallmark, such as in cancer, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disease, infectious pathogens, and injury. In addition, V-Sense can be used for accurate measurements of tissue oximetry in vivo via ¹⁹F relaxation-time measurements (1-5).

 

References

1. Sotak CH, et al. Assessment of changes in murine tumor oxygenation in response to nicotinamide using ¹⁹F NMR relaxometry of a perfluorocarbon emulsion. Magn Reson Med, 1993. 29(3): p. 303-10.
2. Dardzinski BJ and Sotak CH. Rapid tissue oxygen tension mapping using ¹⁹F inversion-recovery echo-planar imaging of perfluoro-15-crown-5-ether. Magn Reson Med, 1994. 32(1): p. 88-97.
3. Nöth U, et al. In vivo measurement of partial oxygen pressure in large vessels and in the reticuloendothelial system using fast ¹⁹F-MRI. Magn Reson Med, 1995. 34(5): p. 738-45.
4. Duong TQ and Kim SG. In vivo MR measurements of regional arterial and venous blood volume fractions in intact rat brain. Magn Reson Med, 2000. 43(3): p. 393-402.
5. Fan X, et al. Effect of carbogen on tumor oxygenation: combined fluorine-19 and proton MRI measurements. Int J Radiat Oncol, 2002. 54(4): p. 1202-9.