Narrator:        This is Science Today. The drug development process, which includes clinical trials, can be very tedious and expensive. At the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a team of University of California, San Francisco researchers are using a technique called soft x-ray tomography to get a three-dimensional view of cells. Gerry McDermott, a research biophysicist says they're able to see just how a drug candidate affects tissues.

McDermott:   Facilities like this are really unique and they benefit from having a multi-disciplinary team, so we have physicists, computer people, cell biologists, chemists — all of those people have to work together as a team to generate this kind of science.

Narrator:        The work is being conducted at the Berkeley Lab's National Center for X-Ray Tomography.

McDermott:   One of the major future goals is to extend a study that we've been carrying out over the past year looking at how the malaria parasite invades red blood cells. So, looking at possible new drugs and how these new drugs will prevent malaria and cure malaria.

Narrator:        For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.