PerkinElmer is providing its PhenoVue Cell Painting Kits to the Joint Undertaking in Morphological Profiling-Cell Painting (JUMP-CP) consortium. The consortium, spearheaded by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and including leading pharmaceutical companies and non-profit research organisations, is focused on creating and sharing the world’s largest, public cell imaging data set to help scientists determine the mechanism of action of new therapeutics before they are introduced into patients in clinical trials.
When completed, the dataset will feature information from over one billion cells responding to more than 140,000 small molecule and genetic perturbations. A current lack of comprehensive and open access to this type of valuable data – including compound activity and toxicity reactions and disease matching insights – has been a major bottleneck in drug discovery, leading to longer development cycles.
Using the PerkinElmer PhenoVue kit, which features validated, preoptimised fluorescent-probes, consortium scientists will benefit from the convenience and simplicity of its ready-to-use format and compatibility with high-content screening applications. This will help save the researchers both time and resources.
Commenting on the importance of the JUMP-CP collaboration, Dr. Alan Fletcher, Senior Vice President of Life Sciences at PerkinElmer said, “One of the key challenges for drug discovery today is anticipating how potential new drugs will act when they enter the human body. Cell Painting is an exciting new way to combine cell and computational biology to conduct more predictive drug discovery which can help accelerate time to market for novel therapies while reducing late-stage failures at clinical trial.”
Also speaking to the goals and value of the effort, Dr. Anne Carpenter, Senior Director of the Imaging Platform at the Broad Institute, said, “Cell Painting is proving to be such a powerful data source for identifying phenotypic patterns in cells that have been impacted by compounds, gene alterations, or disease.”
