High content
cellular imaging in drug discovery
Dr. Stephen T.C.
Wong
Abstract
The bioscience research community faces for the first time the
prospect of identifying and understanding the functions and interactions of
macromolecules in human cells with high throughput, large scale approaches
owing to the rapid advances of optical fluorescence microscopy in the past
decades. Automated digital
microscopy, coupled with a large arsenal of fluorescent and other labeling
techniques, offers tremendous values to localize,
identify and characterize cells and molecules. It has become a
quantitative technique for probing cellular structure and dynamics and is
increasingly used for cell-based assays and screens. The new
development, in turn, generates many bioinformatics challenges in developing
innovative algorithms and tools to extract, classify, model, correlate, and
mine image features and content from massive amounts of images for both
hypothesis-driven analysis and hypothesis-generated tasks.
High
content cellular imaging concerns the automation and quantitation
of cellular information in a scale that is not achievable by the conventional
manual microscopic approach. The technology couples automated multi-dimensional
microscopy imaging and image analysis with biostatistical
and data mining techniques to provide a system biologic approach in studying
the cells, the basic unit of life, and potentially leads to many exciting
applications in life and health sciences. In this talk, I will introduce the
concept of high content cellular analysis and briefly describe selected
applications in drug discovery and genomic-wide screens.
Biography:
Stephen Wong,
PhD (CS), PE (EE), is the founding Director and Principal Investigator of HCNR
Center for Bioinformatics and an Associate Professor of Radiology, Harvard
Medical School and Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Boston, USA. Dr. Wong has over 20 year R&D and
leadership experience in academia and industry worldwide. He is a hybrid scientist who has
successfully straddled the fields of computing and biomedicine. His current research is focused on new
algorithms and applications of bioinformatics and biomedical imaging in disease
understanding and management, in particular, neurodegeneration.
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Date: |
November 18, 2004
(Thursday) |
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Time: |
4:00 – 5:00pm |
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Place: |
Room 517, Meng Wah Complex |
* organized by the group on Numerical Mathematics and Applied Analysis
(NMAA)
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All are welcome |