Unlocking barriers to progress in bioimaging: NCRIS supports Wellcome initiative

Microscopy Australia and the National Imaging Facility, as part of Global Bioimaging, are looking forward to supporting Wellcome’s new initiative: Reducing barriers to progress in bioimaging.

Bioimaging, the ability to image biological life, it a vital technique for addressing grand societal challenges. It is critical in health, veterinary, agricultural and environmental research from fundamental discovery through to product translation and commercialisation. Because of this, barriers to progress in bioimaging have flow on effects limiting progress in critical research.

Microscopy Australia and the National Imaging Facility, established through Australia’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, provide critical national infrastructure for bioimaging spanning from the nanoscale through to whole body imaging. To advance bioimaging, and to help reduce barriers to access, both projects are involved in the Global Bioimaging consortium, an international network of cutting-edge bioimaging facilities and communities who cooperate internationally to build capacity and propose solutions to the challenges faced by the imaging community.

As a first step to identifying barriers in bioimaging, Wellcome, a global charity that supports science to solve the urgent health issues, commissioned a landscape analysis of the global bioimaging research across a diverse array of settings and countries. They found that barriers fell into two major categories: infrastructure (e.g., cost of equipment, lack of access, lack of expertise) and scientific/technical (e.g., sample preparation, method standardisation, big data analysis, resolution limits).

Based on these findings, Wellcome have planned two initial bioimaging funding activities to address these barriers:

1. Increase access to bioimaging facilities and training in bioimaging methodologies for researchers in low- and middle-income countries.
   This activity, launching in January 2024, will see a series of funding calls delivered via a partnership with Global Bioimaging (GBI), a global consortium of imaging infrastructures. Their established network and understanding of the global bioimaging landscape will maximise reach and impact.
2. Enabling the development of novel tools and technology for bioimaging.
   Wellcome will deliver a two-phase directed funding call, launching in January 2024, with the aim of bringing together technology developers and users in collaborative frameworks to tackle some of the biggest methodological barriers currently holding up discovery research.

Microscopy Australia and the National Imaging Facility, with our GBI partners, are looking forward to enabling activity one. Both already participate in GBI’s staff shadowing program. With support from Wellcome, we hope to extend this support, and opportunities for knowledge exchange, to more researchers in low- and middle- income countries.

Read Wellcome’s press release.

Download the full report: ‘Landscape review of barriers affecting progress in the field of Bioimaging’