March 31st , 2021 at 4PM EST

Benjamin Mead, PhD – Postdoctoral Fellow in Shalek Lab at MIT

“Empowering discovery in complex models of tissue biology”

Empowered by approaches such as single-cell transcriptomics, we are in a period of unprecedented profiling of human disease. While these tissue profiles uncover many novel therapeutic hypotheses, we are often limited in our ability to functionally validate and extend these observations owning to a lack of developed biological models and high throughput techniques. I will be sharing some of our work to build out high-fidelity models of complex tissues by leveraging intestinal organoids and single cell transcriptomics along with paired techniques to achieve higher throughput perturbations of these complex, often sample-limited models.

Zhixiang Tong , PhD – Director of Assay Development & Automation at Herophilus (formerly System1 Biosciences)

“Microenvironment Engineering towards Complex Phenotypic Assays and their HTS Applications”

Drug discovery benefits from increasingly predictive in vitro microphysiological systems (MPS). Biomaterials (e.g. hydrogels) have emerged as a powerful tool for modeling tissue microenvironment, which represents a key constituent of MPS. Here we showcase how hydrogels can be rationally engineered for 3D liver fibrosis modeling and phenotypic drug screening at unprecedented scale (i.e. in 1536w format). Challenges with harnessing 3D/complex disease models for early-stage drug discovery will also be highlighted.