BAGIM Event: Anne Carpenter, Ph.D.

Anne Carpenter will present on "Accelerating drug discovery through the power of microscopy images."

Microscopy images contain tremendous information about the state of cells, tissues, and organisms. We work with biomedical researchers around the world to extract metrics from cell images, particularly in high-throughput screening experiments testing drugs in disease model systems. As the cell systems and phenotypes of interest become more complex, so are the computational approaches needed to properly extract the information of interest; we continue to bridge the gap between biologists’ needs, such as 3D organoid models, and the latest in computational science, such as deep learning algorithms.

Beyond measuring features that biologists specify, we extract even more from images through profiling experiments using the Cell Painting assay, where thousands of morphological features are measured from each cell’s image. We are working to harvest similarities in these “profiles” for identifying how drugs and genes affect cells, identifying the functional impact of cancer-associated alleles, discovering disease-associated phenotypes, and identifying novel therapeutics. Ultimately, we aim to make perturbations in cell morphology as computable as genomics data.

All novel algorithms and approaches from our laboratory are released as open-source software, including CellProfiler, CellProfiler Analyst, and cytominer.

Anne Carpenter is senior director of the Imaging Platform at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Carpenter is now a pioneer in image-based profiling, the extraction of rich, unbiased information from images for drug discovery, and functional genomics. She collaborates with dozens of biomedical research groups around the world to develop and apply image analysis methods to diverse biological questions. Carpenter is an NIH MIRA investigator, an NSF CAREER awardee, and has received recognition and research funding from numerous other groups including the Human Frontiers in Science program and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Carpenter earned her B.S. from Purdue University and her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Please follow her on twitter: @DrAnneCarpenter