Computer Vision News - December 2021

17 Multimodal Single-Cell Data Integration “ What we’re really trying to do is take these kinds of high-dimensional datasets that give you a holistic view of what’s happening at the level of cells and tissues, to understand how we can focus on the effect of drugs on biological systems, ” he explains. “ We do this by not focusing on a single protein, which is what the traditional pharmaceutical pipeline does, but rather looking more holistically at the cell as a complex dynamic system. I spend a lot of time thinking about methods to understand what’s actually happening when that system is perturbed in a certain way. How can I quantify the changes the cell undertakes and predict what kind of intervention would allow us to go from a diseased state to a healthy state to enable a patient to go about living their life? ” Daniel and his co-authors will also be presenting a paper at NeurIPS called A sandbox for prediction and integration of DNA, RNA, and proteins in single cells . the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has been a huge sponsor of this effort so far, ” Daniel points out. “ Their support towards this kind of open scientific effort is non-zero-sum. They have a long track record of doing these kinds of events that bring people together. Continuing to get to be involved with them is a huge privilege as an organization. ” Daniel is already looking at planning other competitions in the future. The team are in preliminary talks about an event next year around a different set of tasks. They very much hope they will get to run the competition in person next time . Like many other events in recent times, NeurIPS is virtual this year. When he is not doing this open-source community work, Daniel works as a machine learning scientist at Cellarity, a young biotech company under the Flagship Pioneering umbrella. Flagship has been in the news recently as the investor behind Moderna.