Objective

Advances in preclinical imaging have enabled minimally invasive monitoring of physiological and structural changes in vivo, for longitudinal studies of disease progression, drug delivery and therapeutic response. Here we present data from four exemplar studies demonstrating the use of preclinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound, micro-computed tomography (CT) and fluorescence imaging to monitor drug treatment effects in vivo: (1) A preclinical MRI study of ibrutinib for the treatment of T-cell lypmhoma, (2) Use of high frequency ultrasound and arterial distensibility analysis to monitor the effects of opioids on vascular function in a mouse model of abdominal aortic aneurysm, (3) Quantification of lung tumour burden by micro-CT imaging of mice to monitor the treatment efficacy of the chemotherapy drug carboplatin in KRAS^LSL-G12D/+ mice, (4) In-vivo fluorescence imaging of subcutaneously implanted, fluorescently labelled tumours to assess the treatment effects of the chemotherapy drug cisplatin in control and Rab coupling protein (RCP) knockout mice. These case studies demonstrate the benefits of non-invasive, serial imaging performed in the same group of animals at carefully selected time-points in optimising the sensitivity of in vivo preclinical drug studies.