Blog – Page 34

Visualizing cells after editing specific genes can help scientists learn new details about the function of those genes. But using microscopy to do this at scale can be challenging, particularly when studying thousands of genes at a time.

Now, researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, along with collaborators at Calico Life Sciences, have developed an approach that brings the power of microscopy imaging to genome-scale CRISPR screens in a scalable way.

PERISCOPE—which stands for perturbation effect readout in situ via single-cell optical phenotyping—combines two technologies developed by Broad scientists: Cell Painting, which can capture images and key measures of subcellular compartments at scale, and Optical Pooled Screening, which “barcodes” cells and uses CRISPR to systematically turn off individual genes to study their function in those cells.

📝 — Kim, et al.

The goal of the present study was to identify potential pivotal molecules with implications for novel and efficacious treatment options for pancreatic cancer, a disease with limited treatments available and notorious for its aggressive nature.

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Pancreatic cancer is one of the most aggressive forms of cancer and is the seventh leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) accounts for over 90% of pancreatic cancers. Most pancreatic cancers are recalcitrant to radiation, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy, highlighting the urgent need for novel treatment options for this deadly disease. To this end, we screened a library of kinase inhibitors in the PDAC cell lines PANC-1 and BxPC-3 and identified two highly potent molecules: Aurora kinase inhibitor AT 9,283 (AT) and EGFR kinase inhibitor WZ 3,146 (WZ). Both AT and WZ exhibited a dose-dependent inhibition of viability in both cell lines.