Uppsala University

Enhancing drug discovery with cellular intelligence

Supported by PHI, scientists at Uppsala University apply state of the art artificial intelligence on its very source of inspiration — cell biology.

Modern artificial intelligence is based on computer models of interconnected brain cells, trained by a large number of example tasks. Each time the “brain cells” solves an example task incorrectly, the partial answer from each cell is adjusted to give a more correct answer when the cell network is asked to solve the same task again. This learning process is repeated until the brain cell model correctly solves all the tasks it has been given.

Headed by Associate Professor Ola Spjuth, scientists with the Department of Pharmaceutical Bioinformatics employ information-rich imaging techniques to develop methods, algorithms and software to model pharmaceutical interactions at cell-level. A key goal of the partnership is to understand how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can contribute to the drug discovery process in a robotized high-content imaging setting.

Ola Spjuth

PHI’s holographic microscopy technology enables us to perform label-free cellular process monitoring, and our objective is to make use of these images in AI modeling to replace some of our current assays based on fluorescence.

Ass. Prof. Ola Spjuth

Department of Pharmaceutical Bioinformatics, Uppsala University

The Partnerships

Lund University Banner

Lund University Cancer Centre

The early HoloMonitor development began at Lund University. The relationship between Lund University and PHI has since evolved into partnerships with several research groups.
UCSF Banner

UCSF

University of California in San Francisco, Gladstone Institutes and PHI jointly operate San Francisco’s Holographic Imaging Cytometry Center of Excellence.
NIA Banner

National Institute on Aging

In pursuit of making novel research tools available to National Institute on Aging and the medical research community in general, NIA and PHI are collaborating to develop a fluorescence module to PHI’s HoloMonitor.
Gladstone Banner

Gladstone Institutes

Gladstone Institutes, UCSF and PHI jointly operate San Francisco’s Holographic Imaging Cytometry Center of Excellence.
Commencement at University of Utah

Huntsman Cancer Institute

Supported by PHI, Dr. Robert Judson-Torres and his team at Huntsman Cancer Institute aim to develop methods to quantify the phenomena known as epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT).
Partnerships_PHI_Malmo_Hogskola

Malmö University

PHI and Malmö University have a long-standing collaboration, dating back to 2008. The collaboration has resulted in several peer reviewed publications and a doctoral thesis.
Northeastren University banner

Northeastern University

The joint program of excellence between Northeastern University and PHI began in late 2014. Since then HoloMonitor technology has rapidly established itself as a technology of choice for label-free kinetic cellular analysis.