Drug Discovery News: 'You Cannot Understand Biology by Killing It'
Media Coverage - 2026-05-11
By Precigenetics Team
Drug Discovery News published a feature by Bree Foster, PhD, on the growing recognition in the field that dynamic biology requires dynamic measurement. The piece profiles Precigenetics and Cell Cinema — our highest-resolution spatial readout — and centers on a paradox at the heart of modern drug discovery: to learn how living systems respond to intervention, we routinely destroy them.
Some highlights from the article:
- Why even densely sampled time-series omics studies are still stitched approximations built from discrete, destructive snapshots, and what gets missed between sampled moments
- How subcellular vibrational spectroscopy — well-established in materials science and even used on Mars rovers — can interrogate living cells continuously without perturbing the system being measured
- What it means to measure the entire cell rather than a single labeled target, and why that matters for catching toxicity and resistance long before they would surface in standard viability or sequencing-based assays
- The case for a shared, high-quality reference layer for cellular state and dynamics — the protein database equivalent the field is missing
- An introduction to Cleopatra, the toxicity foundation model we are building and plan to release in the spirit of AlphaFold
