In the second episode of TechBio Talks, host Chris Gibson talks to Anne Carpenter, Institute Scientist and Imaging Platform Senior Director at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a pioneer in image-based profiling, who played a key role in Recursion’s origin story.
Anne talks about her early discovery that phenomics-based profiling could be as powerful as mRNA profiling; how she decides what data to make by determining the problems she can solve well; how these tools can be deployed to produce safer chemicals; the critical role of open science in advancing new technologies; and why the race to the virtual cell “is more like a mosh pit.”
⏱️ Timestamps:
00:00: Welcome to TechBio Talks
02:33: The dinner conversation that helped lay the foundation for Recursion
03:06: Discovering that cell morphology could be as powerful as mRNA profiling
05:32: Behind the open-source tool, CellProfiler
06:21: The importance of relevant biology
07:21: In drug discovery, framing the problem is the real bottleneck
08:55: Which types of data are most important for drug discovery
10:52: Why we need open data
12:30: What it’s like to see others utilize and advance her technology
14:02: How the virtual cell race is “more like a mosh pit”
15:27: Evolving the definition of the virtual cell
17:38: From systemization to major industry shift
18:51: Anne’s “big bold bet”
20:48: The proposed cost to test existing medicines against rare diseases
22:29: Parting thoughts: “If you are interested in data sciences and you're tired of mRNA profiles – check out image-based data”
