Meet the scientists: Anusha Gupta, the scientist behind the development of the CBF assay

• Why was it you out of the team that ended up working on this?

Anusha Gupta: I have been leading the development of the Small Airway Epithelial Cell (SAEC) model as well as the associated compound toxicity assays at Newcells. Since I joined the company three years ago, I have gained a thorough understanding of the SAEC model, which has been a key contributor to further progressing the establishment of the CBF assay and aid the development of the CiliaBeat software.

• What makes the assay and software so special?

Anusha Gupta: The ciliary movements on our healthy in vitro model are in itself very interesting to understand, but further understanding the changes to ciliary function in an otherwise diseased state and/or due to compound treatments is even more exciting! The Ciliabeat software is quite special in that it is highly sensitive to CBF changes as small as 0.25 Hz, that allow us to detect any subtle changes in ciliary function. The customisability of the assay with treatment windows and dosing strategies make it even more special. I especially find it really helpful that CiliaBeat is able to efficiently process a large data set (>3000! sample videos) overnight, allowing further understanding of the compound effects ASAP the very next day!

• What was exciting about working on the new software and assay?

Anusha Gupta: I was very excited to have had the opportunity to develop a robust method to identify the most efficacious compounds, mucolytics for example, to progress through the drug development process! This was an opportunity for me to directly address challenges that I faced during analysis studies in the past. Many of the open-source tools available for CBF analysis that I used previously made it quite cumbersome to process larger datasets. These lacked the processing options and the output metrics that I was looking for to better understand ciliary function in our assay. I was motivated to improve our CBF analysis by implementing a filter to remove any non-active cilia and background noise, thus resulting in a more accurate measurement. My favourite feature about the assay is that we are able to visualise the drastic changes in CBF over a region of interest when treated with fast-acting compounds like ATP!

• What was the most challenging thing about working on this assay?

Anusha Gupta: While the assay and software development has been quite challenging, we have now learnt more about our small airway model and have even higher confidence in the data we produce. One of the technical issues we dealt with was ensuring to remove surrounding vibrations from the laboratory that are picked up by the microscope to reduce background noise signals so as to not interrupt the CBF measurements. On the software side of things, one of the challenges we worked on was improving the generated heatmaps to accurately represent the calculated frequency and area covered by active cilia (and also use pretty colour scales!).

• What will you take away from this project?

Anusha Gupta: This project has been a great experience and I have enjoyed working on a whole new range of challenges, dealing with concepts related to software development that were quite new to me in order to ensure that what we were developing would be of the highest standards. I am proud to have taken a product/service from concept development, assay optimisation and validation all the way through to commercial launch. I am really looking forward to working with clients to understand their compounds better, investigate the complexities of ciliary function and to supporting scientific progress in the field!