Abstract

Collaborative Phenotyping at King’s College London: Hipsci and the Stem Cell Hotel

Davide Danovi, Director, HipSci Cell Phenotyping, Kings College London

A clear understanding of the limitation of the current approaches in Drug Discovery is emerging throughout academia and industry. Efforts incorporating relevant cells, advanced cell culture techniques, artificial microenvironment, imaging and data analysis are moving forward allowing unprecedented opportunities in the modelling of diseases and identification of targets and therapies. The HipSci project brings together the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the University of Dundee, King’s College London and the European Bioinformatics institute. A large panel of hundreds of cell lines reprogrammed from adult cells donated by healthy volunteers and patients are being fully characterised in genomics, proteomics and cell behaviour. We work within this framework at the Centre for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine directed by Fiona Watt at King’s College London. We have established assays for imaging of induced pluripotent stem cells and are also developing solutions to integrate dynamic and end-point high content data with the other datasets provided by the partner centres in the project. The expertise in stem cell biology, image analysis and engineered substrates as well as access to specialised equipment are now opening to interested scientists through a dedicated collaborative phenotyping space, the Stem Cell Hotel.