Imagen Bioworks Inc.

Scalable Spatiotemporal-omics Platform - Project Summary/abstract Accurately Predicting the Clinical Efficacy of Drug Candidates During Pre-clinical Drug Discovery Has the Power to Revolutionize the Biopharmaceutical Industry. to This End, “profiling” Techniques Have Gained Rapid Adoption in the Drug Discovery Processes Because These Techniques Can Assess a Broad Range of Features – Such as Gene Expression or Spatial Features – Offering a Holistic Understanding of a Drug’s Potential Impact. the Collected Profile Data Can Be Utilized to Identify and Validate New Drug Targets, Elucidate Mechanisms of Action, Pinpoint Promising Drug Candidates, and Reposition Drugs, Ultimately Providing Multi-faceted Benefits During Pre-clinical Drug Discovery. However, a Critical Limitation of Current Profiling Techniques Is That They Fail to Assess How Drugs Affect Spatiotemporal Properties by Altering the Genomic, Epigenomic, Transcriptomic, and Proteomic Underpinnings of Cells. This Is a Critical Limitation Because Many Disease Abnormalities and Drugs’ Therapeutic Effects Manifest via Changing the Spatiotemporal Properties of Cells. Therefore, Linking These Cellular Spatiotemporal Properties to Underlying Omics Data Can Provide a Powerful Insight Into Drug Mechanism and Function. While Spatial Omics Platforms Do Exist, Their Prohibitive Costs and Limited Utility in Live Cell Cultures Make Them Unsuitable for Pre-clinical Drug Discovery. to Address This Issue, Imagen Bioworks Is Developing an Innovative Spatiotemporal- Omics Workflow Suitable for Pre-clinical Drug Discovery. This Workflow, Spotlight-omics, Is a Cost-effective Technique That Can Isolate Interesting Spatiotemporal Phenotypes From Live Cell Cultures. We Plan to Use the Spotlight Platform to Isolate a Subpopulation of Cells Showing Disease-relevant Spatiotemporal Properties After Drug Exposure and Subject the Isolated Cells to Subsequent Omics Assays. Two Critical Hurdles Must Be Overcome Before Spotlight-omics Is Ready to Be Commercialized: (aim 1) Achieving Faster Optical Tagging and Enabling Cell Sorting of Multiple Phenotypic Subgroups. Achieving Aim 1 Will Provide Significant Timesaving, Increase in Cell Isolation Yield, and Enable Greater Types of Downstream Omics Assays. (aim 2) Demonstrating the Feasibility and the Utility of Using Spotlight-omics to Profile the Effects of Drugs on Spatiotemporal Properties. Overall, Our Proposal Leverages Recent Advancements in Computer Vision, Spatial/temporal Omics, Multi-omics, and Drug Profiling. Successful Completion of This Proposal Will Lead to a New Drug Profiling Technique That Our Biopharma Customers Can Utilize to Gain Additional Insights Into the Function of Drugs During Pre-clinical Drug Discovery.