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”