

They were joined by a third co-founder, bioinformatician Blake Borgeson.Īlso: Instagram predicts the flu. Gibson joined with Li to found Recursion on the premise that rich pictures of cells could yield original insights that regular screening couldn't. Cell painting was able to confirm some hunches for Gibson in the traces of CCM, but also, "it was seeing something I wasn't seeing," he said when applying machine learning to the information-rich images. Gibson and his mentor, Dean Li, then professor of medicine and biology at the university, tried out the approach. "We had become familiar with Carpenter's approach, where she was able to feed things into a machine classifier," he recalls, and automate the examination of many molecules all at once. He founded the company on the premise vastly more information about cell morphology can yield new clues for disease. Recursion chief executive Chris Gibson had an epiphany of sorts when he was pursuing his PhD and encountered Anne Carpenter's technique for staining cells to create massive profiles. The perturbations could include something like altering a cell's RNA to see how it changes the structure of the cell. Instead, the process of creating a "profile" of a cell quantifies hundreds or thousands of characteristics about the structure of a cell that can then be introduced as input to a machine learning model to in turn find features of interest that change with perturbations. Painting the cell goes beyond the typical "screening" of cells, which aims to pick out a handful of features.
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The software she created, "CellProfiler," is available for download for free. Cell painting was developed by Anne Carpenter of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., who runs the Carpenter Lab there. It begins with a procedure called "cell painting" that covers the cells in as many fluorescent dies as possible, to bring out aspects of the structure of the cell.
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