Rescheduled from September: ASCCT-ESTIV Webinar: Application of cell painting for chemical hazard evaluation in support of screening-level assessments

Application of Cell Painting for chemical hazard evaluation in support of screening-level assessments 

Jo Nyffeler, PhD, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) 

“Cell Painting” is an imaging-based, high-throughput method to obtain phenotypic information of individual cells. Initially used mainly in pharma industry for hit discovery, Cell Painting can be applied to other research questions, such as safety assessment. 
The Center for Computational Toxicology and Exposure at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has applied Cell Painting to environmental chemicals and explored its use for screening-level chemical hazard evaluation of environmental chemicals. 

In this webinar, I will walk you through the findings of our recent publication (Nyffeler et al. 2023, PMID: 37044265, DOI: 10.1016/j.taap.2023.116513). Using multiple examples, I will outline the applicability of Cell Painting. Cell Painting can be used to obtain in vitro potency estimates for chemicals that can be compared to exposure information. Moreover, as others have already shown, Cell Painting can be used to group chemicals with similar mode-of-actions. We showed that this also works for environmental chemicals with less defined mechanisms-of-action. Cell Painting is able to also highlight critical differences that would not have been apparent when only looking at structural information. Thus, this webinar will give you an overview of possible application of Cell Painting in the context of safety assessment.