April 22, 2008 – The U.K.-based NanoSight Limited, supplier of equipment for nanotechnology R&D, says it has received the 100th purchase order for its nanoparticle tracking analysis system, which counts individual particles in liquid.

The NanoSight system uses an optical microscope combined with a digital camera to record 30 frames per second of individual nanoparticles moving under Brownian motion in liquid as they pass through a laser beam. Each particle will scatter light and it is this light path that is followed. Advanced software enables the path of each particle to be “tracked” to give a very accurate size dispersion calculation which is invaluable when studying systems with different size ranges. According to NanoSight, the system is the only offering of its kind on the market.

Professor Steffen Petersen of the University of Aalborg in Denmark selected the NanoSight LM10 to study the build-up of multi-layered, targeted nanoparticle drug delivery systems. His particular attraction to the LM10 is its ability to not just to size particles but to investigate the potential to provide information about an individual particle’s refractive index.

Among the goals of Petersen’s group is the construction of drug delivery vehicles around an iron oxide core that will enable the researchers to study how effective different targeting molecules are using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques.

NanoSight Ltd, provides a range of instruments for the optical detection and real-time analysis of sub-micron particles. The Company claims its instruments offer significant advantages compared to other instruments based on light-scattering techniques. The LM10 is one of several metrology solutions currently under scrutiny with the National Physical Laboratory as a potential next-generation characterization standard.