Christian Lackas (PhD-Physics-Aachen University) and Jack Hoppin (PhD-Applied Mathematics-University of Arizona) established inviCRO in 2008 to address the need for proper informatics in the growing field of pre-clinical imaging.  Lackas and Hoppin began working together as office-mates in the laboratory of Dr. Nils Schramm at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, a large German national laboratory located northwest of Cologne.

At Jülich, both contributed to the development of a multi-pinhole SPECT technology that provided high-resolution and high-sensitivity SPECT scans of laboratory animals. Subsequently, Lackas and Hoppin joined Washington D.C.-based molecular-imaging expert Bioscan to develop the multi-pinhole technology into a product, the NanoSPECT/CT, the leading small-animal SPECT scanner.

Dr. Lackas attended Bioscan as Director of Imaging Application Development and was responsible for the development of the CT component of the NanoSPECT/CT. He also managed software development and has built an international application service team for Bioscan's imaging customers. He joined inviCRO to be able to realize his idea of a pre-clinical PACS system and foster analysis methods dedicated to molecular imaging.

Dr. Hoppin's doctoral work studies statistics in medical imaging; his Ph.D. thesis, "Ranking Estimation Methods in Medical Imaging Without the Use of a Gold Standard", develops a maximum-likelihood approach for comparing different estimation methods to the gold standard without its use. Following this and his time at Forschungszentrum Jülich (Humboldt Fellowship), Dr. Hoppin was the Vice President of Imaging Systems at Bioscan, driving the imaging branch from its start to a two-figure million annual revenue business during his tenure. Currently, he is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at Northeastern University in addition to being managing partner at inviCRO. His vision for the company is to continue its path as a provider of software and service for all branches of pre-clinical molecular imaging. He says, "We want to provide our customers with a comprehensive package, managing all steps of a pre-clinical imaging study from design and acquisition management to post-processing and the written report; always in close collaboration with the sponsor".

inviCRO offers two software products: the VivoQuant viewing package and the iPACS^TM, a web-based study center/PACS. There are currently over 175 VivoQuant licenses on the market as well as five beta installations of the iPACS^TM. Additionally, inviCRO offers full-service pre-clinical outsourced imaging studies (in collaboration with 5 partner sites) and high-throughput, semi- and fully-automated image analysis.