A method known as Cell Painting might pace drug discovery

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A method known as Cell Painting might pace drug discovery


Now some are embracing a brand new paradigm: Measure every little thing, ask questions later. This motto drives a lab at Harvard and MIT’s Broad Institute, the place researchers have developed a technique for producing a treasure trove of knowledge on a cell’s internal workings that they will sift for years to return. The technique, generally known as Cell Painting, impressed scientists at a number of pharmaceutical corporations—a lot that they launched a consortium and pooled assets, utilizing the strategy to create an enormous knowledge set that they started releasing to the general public in November. The JUMP–Cell Painting Consortium, because it’s known as, hopes the database will speed up drug discovery by serving to researchers determine promising compounds and get a greater sense of what they do and what types of uncomfortable side effects they may have earlier than the molecules get examined in animals or individuals.

Cell Painting makes use of as much as six fluorescent dyes to gentle up main elements of the cell, such because the nucleus and mitochondria. A microscope snaps photos of the varied stains, and software program measures morphological options like dimension, form, depth, and texture, creating an image-based profile of the pattern. It is “just about the simplest imaging assay you can manage,” says computational biologist Anne Carpenter, who developed the strategy and co-leads the Broad Institute lab with Shantanu Singh. “Our mission was to choose the absolute cheapest, easiest dyes.” 

Beyond ease of use, the facility of Cell Painting lies within the sheer quantity of information that comes from one experiment. The newly launched database accommodates photos of cells responding to greater than 140,000 perturbations—both a drug remedy or another modification that turns a gene’s exercise up or down. Using this knowledge set, Carpenter and a few of her colleagues discovered a dozen compounds that appear to have an effect on the identical buildings which might be influenced by a key gene concerned in a fast-growing muscle most cancers. Rather than placing tons of of samples via a number of rounds of wet-lab experiments, the Broad researchers got here up with the drug record a number of years in the past by typing the identify of the gene into the database. 

“It’s a totally different approach that has a lot fewer steps and is a lot less costly,” says T.S. Karin Eisinger, a biologist on the University of Pennsylvania who research that specific muscle most cancers. Her group labored with Carpenter’s to validate the compounds in wet-lab exams, and the 2 scientists are launching an organization to additional develop probably the most promising candidates. Others are a bit additional alongside: Recursion Pharmaceuticals, an organization in Salt Lake City for which Carpenter is an advisor, has already launched 5 medical trials to check drug candidates recognized utilizing a model of Cell Painting.

As it wraps up its public launch, consortium members are gearing as much as work with the Health and Environmental Sciences Institute, primarily based in Washington, DC, to see if they will pair outcomes from Cell Painting with different knowledge to foretell the toxicity of prescribed drugs and agrochemicals.

Esther Landhuis is a science and well being journalist primarily based within the San Francisco Bay Area.

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