Rapid Drug Screening for Cancer Treatment

Rapid Drug Screening for Cancer Treatment

Mushriq Al-Jazrawe, Elisabeth Abeyta, Csaba Molnar

Koch Institute at MIT, Broad Institute

We conduct rapid drug screening on cancer samples immediately after they are collected from patients. For example, these are cells collected from a patient with metastatic gastric cancer. Since the cancer cells (stained blue here) are mixed with other cell types (for example, immune cells stained red here), we use imaging to identify different cell types. We also track different cell states (here healthy cells appear orange, dying cells appear green) so that we can track the effect of each drug in our screen on the health of different cell populations. After taking this image (and millions other), we use our computational pipeline to identify individual cells, and measure drug activity on each subpopulation over time. Our goal is to identify effective therapeutic strategies for every cancer patient. 

small bubble-like cells in viivid blues and greens, dotted with red and orange, fill the field of view

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