Lansing Taylor's Biography

Lansing Taylor, Director, University of Pittsburgh

Lans Taylor is the Director of the University of Pittsburgh Drug Discovery Institute and the Allegheny Foundation Professor of Computational & Systems Biology. In my role as the Director of the University of Pittsburgh Drug Discovery Institute, I have the goal to assist both academic and commercial collaborators to discover and to develop efficacious and safe therapeutics based on the integration of outstanding science, technology and drug discovery/development methods.

I began my academic career as an Assistant Professor at Harvard University and remained at Harvard until 1982, developing and using novel fluorescence-based reagents and imaging technologies to investigate fundamental cellular processes in living cells. We developed fluorescent analog cytochemistry to study the temporal-spatial dynamics of proteins. I then moved to Carnegie Mellon University as a Professor of Biological Sciences and as Director of the Center for Fluorescence Research in the Biomedical Sciences. In 1991, I became the Director of the National Science Foundation-funded Center for Light Microscope Imaging and Biotechnology, and in 1995, I was named Vice Dean of CMU’s Division of Molecular Sciences. I continued to develop reagent and imaging technologies, while applying the technologies to understand fundamental processes in cells and tissues. Our laboratory developed ratio imaging to quantify temporal-spatial dynamics of ions, metabolites and proteins in cells, steady-state fluorescence anisotropy microscopy to measure temporal-spatial dynamics of protein binding in cells, the multimode light microscope to perform 4D dynamics of cells in mixed modes of contrast, as well as the Automated Interactive Microscope to perform high-speed 4D analyses on living cells and tissues. I co-founded Biological Detection Systems (BDS) with Alan Waggoner to commercialize the multi-color cyanine dyes and research imaging platforms and it was acquired by Amersham.

A great limitation of imaging technology in the 1990’s was the very slow and interactive nature of image data management and analysis. I left CMU to found Cellomics, Inc., the company that developed High Content Screening (also called automated microscopy). Fully automated microscopy was the foundation for a shift from focusing primarily on generating images to generating large-scale, quantitative data on cells. I was CEO of this company from 1996 through 2003 and it is now part of Thermo Fisher. I then founded a third company, Cellumen, that developed a predictive safety assessment platform using primary hepatocytes, multiplexed panels of reagents, reference safety databases and computational biology. I was CEO of Cellumen from 2004 until 2010 when the company was sold. I also co-founded Cernostics, Inc., a fluorescence-based, tissue systems pathology company. I hold >25 U.S. patents, including six focused on cell-based imaging. I was the recipient of an NIH MERIT award from 1990-2000 and a Pioneer Award from the National Science Foundation. I returned to academia at the end of 2010 to continue my academic interests which now link large-scale cell, tissue and experimental organism profiling with computational and systems biology to optimize drug discovery.

I am focusing my efforts in Quantitative Systems Pharmacology in order to change the paradigm in drug discovery and development. My interests have evolved from single cell activities to understanding cellular population dynamics, including the biological basis for heterogeneity in response to perturbations such as drug treatments. We are investigating populations of cancer cell models labeled with panels of fluorescent probes of pathway nodes, organelle functions and cell health to measure, model and predict outcomes using computational and systems biology methods. In addition, we are exploring the application of tissue-engineered models of organ functions together with imaging technologies and fluorescence-based biose