We’re bringing together leaders in cancer research.
Speaker
Anne Carpenter, PhD
Institute Scientist
Broad Institute
“Insights from cell images: drug discovery in the age of AI”
Fewer than 13% of the 22,000 recognized diseases in the world have FDA-approved treatments – and more diseases are discovered every day. Studying them one by one costs far too much time and money. Could we find ways to tackle many diseases systematically, in parallel? Broad Institute Scientist Anne Carpenter, PhD, will overview several strategies for early drug discovery that are powered by clever advancements in biotechnology and AI. These are accelerating biological discovery and may ultimately break the bottleneck, bringing more treatments to more patients. Robotic instrumentation can screen millions of drugs, and computer vision can identify those that impact cellular disease phenotypes. Pooled optical barcode-based profiling allows testing thousands of genetic samples, which can identify their functions or reveal whether they respond to a given drug. Engineered genetic variants associated with thousands of diseases can be tested at once to identify phenotypes for drug screening. These methods are widely shared, as are the datasets created by consortia led by the Carpenter—Singh lab, including JUMP, OASIS, and VISTA. Some of these technologies power techbio companies reaching clinical trials. Enjoy this glimpse into the cutting-edge intersection of AI, biotech, and several disease areas including neuroscience, metabolic disease, cancer, and rare diseases.