What Comes First From a Cell Observatory?

Eric Betzig says the first thing from the cell observatory is robust segmentation, and segmentation would be valuable in many contexts. Once segmentation is robust, identifying cell types is trivial, and a lab can ask the interesting biological questions, including off-target effects in pharma.

Betzig estimates the cell observatory would take $50 million. The group is developing biological reagents, knocking in fluorescent proteins and dozens or hundreds of tags across cell types, and the microscopes to take the data are already in hand. Zebrafish is the model because the fish is transparent, a vertebrate, and 70 percent genetically homologous with humans. To the extent the match is recapitulated, Betzig says they could build a contract research organization: a company brings a compound about to enter phase one, the lab puts it into the fish, and they see whether harm shows up against a baseline of normal activity across organs and cell types, down toward the molecular level. A bigger field of view means less speed. Small fields of about 50 microns run at maybe 100 millisecond intervals. Larger organs, or half the organism in a young adult, can be covered maybe every 10 minutes.

Betzig says the basic biology and the pharma implications are immense. As hard as he has tried, he has not been able to interest any philanthropist.