Objective

OcellO develops and uses clinically relevant in vitro human tissue models for screening and profiling of small molecules and biologics. Tissues cultured in a natural 3D extracellular matrix environment exhibit phenotypes, function and gene expression profiles close to the original tissue. The analysis of these 3D culture models, which use cell lines and patient-derived material, is enabled by ultra-high content 3D image analysis, feature extraction and machine learning methods. As well as providing more sensitive measurements of cell growth and viability compared to biochemical assays, phenotypic profiling of tissues allows the measurement of more complex or subtle biology, such as differentiation, invasion and planar polarity. Analysing a broad spectrum of phenotypic measurements also enables activity of different signalling pathways to be discriminated, identification of on-target effects and toxic effects to be flagged allowing a better ranking of therapeutic molecules