Salisbury, UK, April 2008 – NanoSight Limited, the nanoparticle characterization company, has recently received their 100th purchase order for their unique nanoparticle tracking analysis system which counts individual particles in liquid.

Professor Steffen Petersen of the University of Aalborg in Denmark has 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 the Petersen group is the construction of drug delivery vehicles around an iron oxide core that will enable the group to study how effective different targeting molecules are using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques.

The NanoSight systems use 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.

For more information about the principles of nanoparticle tracking analysis and how this is applied to many applications in both the biological and materials sciences, please visit www.nanosight.co.uk.

About NanoSight

NanoSight Ltd, of Salisbury, UK, is the world leading provider of instruments for the optical detection and real time analysis of sub-micron particles. The Company supplies unique instruments for nanoparticle analysis in the sub-1 micron region that offer significant advantages compared to existing light scattering techniques. The company currently has over 100 systems in service worldwide having started sales in earnest in 2006.

The Company’s proprietary knowledge and expertise has enabled the delivery of technologies to blue chip companies and universities for direct visualisation of individual nanoscale particles in suspension from which independent quantitative estimation of particle size, size distribution and concentration can be immediately obtained. The Company has recently launched additions to its advanced Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA) software that build on the ground-breaking work of NanoSight’s LM20 and LM10 systems.

The NANOSIGHT LM10 is one of several metrology solutions currently under serious scrutiny with the National Physical Laboratory as a potential next-generation characterisation standard. The Company has a growing base of users worldwide. For more information, visit www.nanosight.co.uk.