Using their automated cell culture platform, scientists at the New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute collaborated with Google Research to successfully identify new cellular hallmarks of Parkinson’s disease by creating and profiling over a million images of skin cells from a cohort of 91 patients and healthy controls.
The study leveraged NYSCF’s vast repository of patient cells and state-of-the-art robotic system – the 'NYSCF Global Stem Cell Array' – to profile images of millions of cells from 91 Parkinson’s patients and healthy controls. Scientists used the Array to isolate and expand skin cells called fibroblasts from skin punch biopsy samples, label different parts of these cells with a technique called 'cell painting' and create thousands of high-content optical microscopy images. The resulting images were fed into an unbiased, artificial intelligence–driven image analysis pipeline, identifying image features specific to patient...