PHENOMICS - Cancer stress PHENomics: autOmatic Microscopy Image analysis for in vitro phenotypization of heterogeneity of stressed tumour CellS

Preclinical in vitro studies typically assay cell viability and proliferation, cell cycle perturbation, programmed cell death triggering, and gene expression modulation of cell samples exposed to physical or chemical treatments. In recent years, the emerging discipline of tissue phenomics has stimulated clinical research, improved clinical drug development and treatment of patients, with a great potential impact on oncology. Analogously, single-cell phenomics by microscope image analysis has the potential to positively impact on in vitro studies, offering a quantitative evaluation of treatment effects. In particular, cell imaging opens to unprecedented spatial phenomization, to capture tumour response heterogeneities at subcellular level, by selecting proper phenomic features. Anticancer treatments share the common goal to selectively stress, and ultimately damage, cancer cells, while not perturbing the physiological state of healthy ones. The aim of PHENOMICS is to characterize cancer cell response to different stress conditions by microscope image analysis, in order to quantify stress-induced alterations in the distribution of phenomic markers. Image-based phenomization will increase the benefit/cost ratio of the studies, by providing more robust and consistent data while reducing times and costs, ultimately boosting the research of effective treatments and speeding up translation of results into next preclinical and clinical trial phases.