Deepcell Archives - Medical Design Sourcing

Deepcell’s CEO forges her own path to transforming cell science with AI and microfluidics

Deepcell co-founder Maddison Masaeli took an unexpected path from academic research to launching an AI-powered cell analysis platform. The company has raised close to $100 million in funding to support its mission. This includes a $73 million Series B round and an earlier $20 million Series A round. The company has entered into a research collaboration with NVIDIA and made generative AI a core focus of their research and development efforts.

From electrical engineering to AI-powered biology

The Deepcell CEO since the company’s founding, Masaeli’s journey shifted from her bachelor’s study of electrical engineering to the life sciences when a chance encounter brought her to a biotech lab as a Harvard-MIT research scholar. “I randomly got introduced to this amazing biotech lab at Harvard at a social event,” she recalled. “I decided to go and explore and see what that was all about.”

The lab specialized in developing methods for tissue engineering…

Amgen, Deepcell tap NVIDIA’s AI to drive drug discovery and advance cell morphology research

[surassawadee/Adobe Stock]

In 2023, generative AI (GenAI) entered the mainstream, capturing the attention of both the public and a growing number of biotechs. One of the most prominent Big Tech firms driving the trend is NVIDIA, which has forged alliances with biotechs ranging from Genentech, Recursion Pharmaceuticals and Evozyne, among others.

The momentum is continuing in early 2024, with NVIDIA announcing renewed pacts with Amgen and DeepCell. Amgen will use NVIDIA’s drug discovery generative AI platform BioNeMo Cloud service to accelerate molecule screening and optimization processes. Meanwhile, NVIDIA’s partnership with Deepcell hinges on advancing cell morphology studies with generative AI. “There is a very big moment happening in the world of pharmaceuticals and how drugs are being discovered,” said Kimberly Powell, vice president of Healthcare at NVIDIA, in a call with journali…

Deepcell’s REM-I platform marries AI with morphological analysis for drug discovery

Introducing Deepcell’s REM-I, which applies AI to cell morphology analysis.

From her early days as a research assistant at UCLA, to her work as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, Deepcell co-founder and CEO Maddison Mahdokht Masaeli has actively engaged in the field of biomedical engineering. Now, Masaeli and her team at Deepcell, a company she co-founded in 2017, are introducing a new strategy to drug discovery with the launch of REM-I. The platform combines AI and morphological analysis, a technique that studies the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features.

“The REM-I platform offers several unique capabilities for deep assessment of single cell images and the ability to sort cells without bias,” Masaeli explained in an interview. “It is specifically designed to expose and analyze the heterogeneity within samples, as well as the heterogeneity in respons…