Cell Painting & Phenomics:
In this free webinar, experts from pixlbio and the Uppsala University will walk through the fundamentals of phenomics workflows, common applications, and how AI-guided approaches are pushing the field forward - alongside the practical data science considerations every Cell Painting experiment depends on.
Cell Painting has become one of the most widely adopted methods in image-based drug discovery — used by hundreds of labs and companies for everything from bioactivity profiling to safety assessment. But generating images is only the start. Getting reproducible, biologically meaningful results requires the right workflows, robust data science, and increasingly, machine learning.
Speakers
Jordi Carreras-Puigvert is Chief Scientific Officer & co-founder of Pixl Bio and an Associate Professor at Uppsala University. His work centers on image-based phenomics and AI for drug discovery, including co-authoring a 2024 field review on Cell Painting. Before Pixl Bio, he led the CBCS Uppsala unit at SciLifeLab, where he helped establish Cell Painting as a national service, and contributed to the pharmb.io program advancing high-content imaging and automation. His research and collaborations span mechanism-of-action prediction, toxicity profiling, and data-driven screening—bridging advanced microscopy with machine learning to accelerate therapeutic discovery.
Ola Spjuth is Professor of Pharmaceutical Bioinformatics at Uppsala University, where he leads Pharmb.io, a research group integrating AI and machine learning with drug discovery and chemical safety. He is Chief AI Officer (CAIO) & co-founder of Pixl Bio. His lab combines in silico modeling with robotized high-content imaging and modern IT infrastructure to generate and analyze large-scale data for screening, toxicity, and mechanism-of-action studies. He publishes widely (5,600+ citations) and advances methods such as conformal-prediction modeling (e.g., CPSign). Previously, he co-directed UPPMAX and headed SciLifeLab’s Bioinformatics Compute & Storage facility, building national capabilities in scientific computing. Current work spans intelligent experiment design and AI for high-content imaging, including recent reviews on how deep learning accelerates image-based drug discovery.He helped launch multiple ventures including Scaleout Systems and Prosilico.
Alexandra Gylfe is a biotech investor-operator and Founding Partner at Nordic Science Investments (NSI), a VC fund backing science-based spinouts across the Nordics. She previously led cancer-genomics R&D at Human Longevity, Inc. in San Diego and later served as Business Development Director at iCAN, Finland’s digital precision cancer-medicine flagship. A former visiting researcher at Stanford, Alexandra holds a PhD in cancer genetics from the University of Helsinki and an MBA from Aalto University. She also contributes to company building as a board member at Thestra, supporting strategy and operational growth. At NSI, she bridges research, product, and capital to help deep-tech teams translate breakthrough science into scalable ventures.
What you’ll hear about
- How Cell Painting captures rich biological information across applications - from mechanism-of-action studies to safety assessment
- How ML and AI methods extract predictive power from high-dimensional phenomics data
- Why batch effects, feature selection, and reproducibility are foundational to any Cell Painting experiment
- Where phenomics fits in the modern drug development pipeline - from bioactivity profiling to predictive biology
More webinars
