Genedata Collaborates with AstraZeneca to Boost Impact of Cellular Imaging in Biopharma Drug Discovery
Award-winning Genedata Imagence HCS imaging enterprise software rolled out to AstraZeneca R&D sites globally with the aim of improving the identification of new drug candidates and drug targets
Basel, Switzerland — December 17, 2020 — Genedata, the leading provider of enterprise software solutions for biopharmaceutical R&D, today announced that Genedata Imagence®, its deep learning-based image analysis software solution, has been licensed by global biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca for use in high content screening (HCS) across its R&D sites. AstraZeneca is the latest addition to the rapidly growing number of research-driven companies benefiting from the award-winning Genedata Imagence, a component of the Genedata Biopharma Platform.
Cellular imaging is a core technology in biopharmaceutical research and development, playing a key role in the discovery of new drug targets as well as in the progression of candidate molecules to the clinic. Genedata Imagence can be used to extract high value information via cellular imaging from sophisticated HCS assays for the study of drug candidates. Using deep learning methods, the software adaptively automates HCS image analysis to each assay. It thereby enables scientists to study differences in drug response across different disease models and heterogeneous cell populations employing cellular imaging techniques.
Genedata Imagence has been found to enable previously uneconomical assays to become viable for screening, thereby expanding the pool of qualified assays available for screening campaigns. In addition to increasing the quality of screening assay results, Genedata Imagence substantially reduces assay analysis time. For optimal scale-out to the global user base, Genedata Imagence has been deployed on a distributed, hybrid architecture in an elastic Cloud environment.
“Imaging assays using complex disease-relevant primary and stem cells are used across our research portfolio to identify new drug targets and to discover new drug candidates,” explained Steve Rees, Vice President, Discovery Biology, R&D at AstraZeneca. “Deployed in the AstraZeneca cloud, Genedata Imagence allows us to democratize Artificial Intelligence at scale across our organization so more scientists can run these assays, extracting more and higher quality information, thereby increasing the quality of decision making on our projects.”
“Genedata has been working for many years with AstraZeneca, supporting them in their goal to automate and accelerate their R&D workflows while enabling their scientists to gain valuable insights from their innovative research,” noted Othmar Pfannes, Ph.D., CEO of Genedata. “We are excited that AstraZeneca has now also adopted Genedata Imagence, the latest component of our Genedata Biopharma platform, globally to harmonize their imaging assay analysis workflows independently of the particular instrumentation used. We foresee quick adoption of Genedata Imagence in the market based on the tremendous time and cost savings the software provides.”
About Genedata
Genedata transforms data into intelligence with innovative software solutions and domain-specific consulting services that automate complex, large-scale experimental processes and enable organizations to maximize the ROI in their R&D, spanning early discovery all the way to the clinic. Founded in 1997, Genedata is headquartered in Switzerland with additional offices in Germany, Japan, Singapore, the UK, and the US.
Contact:
Miles Fisher-Pollard
Genedata
Public Relations
Phone: +41 61 511 8561
pr@genedata.com