News

We are excited to share that Project Encore, a collaboration between J.T. Neal’s lab at the Broad Institute and Anne Carpenter and Runxi Shen at Purdue University, has received an $8.8 million NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award through the NIH Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program.

Encore combines pooled genetic screening, high-dimensional cell imaging, optical barcoding, and computer vision to test millions of drug-disease combinations. The goal is to identify existing drugs that could be repurposed to treat rare genetic diseases, including conditions in which mutations cause proteins to end up in the wrong place inside cells.

The award will fund projects connected to the VISTA Consortium, whose work on rescuing mislocalized proteins is featured on our homepage. VISTA and the Ladders to Cures Scientific Accelerator supported the crucial pilot data that helped make Encore possible. This new funding builds on that foundation to scale up the search for potential treatments.

Read more in the Broad Institute announcement and on the Project Encore website.

We are thrilled to announce the launch of the Carpenter-Shen Lab at Purdue University! Building on the foundation established at the Broad Institute, our lab will continue to push the boundaries of computational image analysis for drug discovery and functional genomics.

Our Mission

We develop computational techniques that accelerate the discovery of new medicines. By combining expertise in machine learning, computer vision, and cell biology, we create tools and methods that enable researchers worldwide to extract rich information from microscopy images of cells.

What’s Next

Stay tuned for updates on our research, open positions, and software releases. We’re excited to be part of the Purdue community and look forward to new collaborations.