First Instrument to Analyze Both Fluorescent and Chromatically Stained Samples

Boston, Massachusetts, August 9, 2004 – – CompuCyte Corporation today announced the introduction of its iColor™ Fluoro-Chromatic Imaging Cytometer, the first product on the market to allow simultaneous analysis of fluorescent and chromatically-stained specimens. The iColor is making its debut at the Drug Discovery Technology ® 2004 World Congress being held in Boston from August 9 to 13.

The new instrument combines the advantages of flow cytometry, fluorescence image analysis, and immunohistochemistry in one unique system. Flow cytometers have traditionally relied solely on measurements obtained from laser excitement of cellular specimens stained with fluorescent dyes. Microscopy systems, on the other hand, have traditionally focused on chromatically stained materials. The iColor Imaging Cytometer employs three lasers to simultaneously measure both fluorescent light emitted by specimens stained with fluorescent dyes, and the light absorbance resulting from the application of chromatic stains to the same specimens. The resulting data and images provide detailed quantitative and morphological information, which previously would have required the use and expense of two or three different systems.

The iColor is expected to be of particular value for pathology applications in research, drug discovery, and drug safety assessment, where chromatic stains are commonly employed.

“CompuCyte’s iColor instrument should be an invaluable tool for researchers studying the molecular biology of cancer and for clinicians treating cancer patients,” remarked Richard Clatch, MD, PhD, Director of Hematopathology at Lake Forest Hospital in Lake Forest, Illinois. “The ability to objectively measure both fluorescence and chromatic signals on tissue sections, cell cultures, and other cell preparations constitutes a milestone advance for oncology and pathology. We finally have an instrument that combines the advantages of flow cytometry and image analysis .”

“The iColor is CompuCyte’s third new instrument in two years, building on the Company’s original LSC technology,” noted Elena Holden, MD, CompuCyte’s President and CEO. “With the release of the iBrowser™ Data Integration Software and the iNovator Application Development Toolkit during the same period, we have greatly enhanced the analytic capabilities of our instruments. Together, these hardware and software advances have positioned CompuCyte as a leading provider of instrumentation for quantitative cellular analysis. The feedback from our customers has been gratifying as well.”

“This new technology provides pathologists with very, very high information content from stained sections of tissue specimens—not just in terms of the ability to resolve morphologic detail, but also in terms of the combination of morphology with quantitative analysis,” explained William Geddie MD, cytopathologist and Director of Immunohistochemistry at the hospitals of University Health Network, in Toronto, Ontario. “It is staggering, frankly, to conceive of the scan of a chromatically stained section yielding this level of information. Just being able to automate the tedium of reading multiple stains of tissue microarrays would be an impressive achievement. But for a pathology researcher to be able to quantify the results, and have high-quality morphology of every field examined available for review, correlation, and further analysis— the implications are enormous.”

CompuCyte Corporation, a private company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a leader in the development of cellular analysis instrumentation and custom application and software development service for the life sciences industries.