GE Healthcare, has unveiled a collaboration with the Harvard Center for Neurodegeneration & Repair (HCNR) to use GE Healthcare's (GEHC) IN Cell Analyzer, a cellular imaging system, to enhance research of the human central nervous system and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. As part of the collaboration, HCNR and GE will jointly develop new software tools designed to improve and speed-up disease analysis in the lab.

GEHC's IN Cell Analyzer is an imaging system used by researchers in pharmaceutical and academic labs to analyze a number of cellular processes in disease definition and drug development. The HCNR was established to develop therapies for neurodegenerative diseases through collaborative translational research. Through the help of the new imaging system, scientists will attempt to decipher the molecular and pathological mechanisms of Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Huntington's disease (HD), ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), and multiple sclerosis (MS), GEHC said.