Reducing animal experiments by integrating Cell Painting into routine safety pharmacology

Assessing safety of early candidates in drug discovery is currently to a large extent based on animal studies, requiring large amounts of animals every year.

During our previous VR-3R project we made considerable progress in positioning Cell Painting (cell morphology with multiplexed stains) as a general and data-rich technology that together with Artificial Intelligence for analysis can be used to cover multiple safety endpoints simultaneously.The purpose of this project is to continue striving towards our main objective: Establishing morphological profiling of cells as a routine method in safety pharmacology testing, and thereby substantially reducing animal experiments in drug discovery.Based on our findings as well as via industrial and international networks, we identified an urgent need to fill data gaps, and we will here focus on important safety endpoints including hepatotoxicity, neurotoxicity, and genotoxicity.

We will use AI-methods for identifying the next, most relevant experiment, and perform them in our robotized lab.

We expect to run 30,000 Cell Painting experiments, constituting a massive boost in data that will improve AI models and contribute towards the incorporation of Cell Painting into pharmaceutical companies pipelines.

We will also expand Cell Painting to 3D spheroids and live-cells, and develop methods for autonomous experimentation towards the ultimate goal of replacing animal experiments.