Cell Painting to Accelerate Drug Discovery: Finding Disease Phenotypes and Candidate Therapeutics Using Images Anne Carpenter Senior Director of the Imaging Platform, Institute Scientist, Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT
Cell images contain a vast amount of quantifiable information about the status of the cell: for example, whether it is diseased, whether it is responding to a drug treatment, or whether a pathway has been disrupted by a genetic mutation. We aim to go beyond measuring individual cell phenotypes that biologists already know are relevant to a particular disease. Instead, in a strategy called image-based profiling, often using the Cell Painting assay, we extract hundreds of features of cells from microscopy images. Just like transcriptional profiling, the similarities and differences in the patterns of extracted features reveal connections among diseases, drugs, and genes.
We are harvesting similarities in image-based profiles to identify, at a single-cell level, how diseases, drugs, and genes affect cells, which can uncover small molecules’ mechanism of action, discover gene functions, predict assay outcomes, discover disease-associated phenotypes, identify the functional impact of disease-associated alleles, and find novel therapeutic candidates. This is leading to a growing impact on the pharmaceutical industry as cell morphology becomes a powerful data source for systems biology alongside molecular omics.