Project Kickoff

The first virtual meeting of the CELLIMAGE consortium was held on Thursday October 7th 2021. With 25+ attendees from the three project partners [ValitaCell, NUI Galway and Intel Healthcare & Life Sciences] plus guests, the session began our mission in earnest.

AI-GUIDED CELL THERAPY MANUFACTURING

The CELLIMAGE Team

Professor Frank Barry [NUIG] set the tone with an overview of the potential of Cell Therapies, focusing upon stem cells in particular, before emphasising the manufacturing challenges and sketching out the CELLIMAGE laboratory effort. Guests from Waters Inc. gave an overview of imaging mass spectrometry, which CELLIMAGE will use a single cell metabolomics tool.

Project Director Dr Paul Dobson [ValitaCell Ltd] outlined how the project will organise and integrate all of these diverse streams of laboratory data in a bioinformatics warehouse, before explaining how ValitaCell’s CellAI tools will extract hard-won experimental data from label-free brightfield images, thereby making cell analytics faster, simpler and cheaper.

Intel Healthcare & Life Sciences gave an overview of how their expertise in developing and deploying AI for the biomedical space would be transferred into bioprocessing.

Despite the physical distance imposed by COVID-19 and Climate Change (CELLIMAGE will avoid flying whenever we can), the kickoff meeting was an enormous success.