A method known as Cell Painting may velocity drug discovery

Now some are embracing a brand new paradigm: Measure all the things, 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 interior workings that they will sift for years to come back. The technique, often called Cell Painting, impressed scientists at a number of pharmaceutical corporations—a lot that they launched a consortium and pooled sources, utilizing the strategy to create a large 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 kinds of negative 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 mild up main parts of the cell, such because the nucleus and mitochondria. A microscope snaps photos of the varied stains, and software program measures morphological options like measurement, form, depth, and texture, creating an image-based profile of the pattern. It is “simply concerning the easiest imaging assay you possibly can handle,” says computational biologist Anne Carpenter, who developed the tactic and co-leads the Broad Institute lab with Shantanu Singh. “Our mission was to decide on absolutely the most cost-effective, best dyes.” 

Beyond ease of use, the ability of Cell Painting lies within the sheer quantity of knowledge that comes from one experiment. The newly launched database incorporates 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 lots of of samples by means of a number of rounds of wet-lab experiments, the Broad researchers got here up with the drug listing a number of years in the past by typing the identify of the gene into the database. 

“It’s a completely totally different strategy that has rather a lot fewer steps and is rather a lot more cost effective,” says T.S. Karin Eisinger, a biologist on the University of Pennsylvania who research that specific muscle most cancers. Her staff labored with Carpenter’s to validate the compounds in wet-lab checks, 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 scientific 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 prescription drugs and agrochemicals.

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