Patient-informed morphological dataset

Recursion modeled the cytokine storm associated with late-stage COVID-19 in endothelial cells by applying cocktails of circulating proteins that mirror those from severe COVID-19 patients as well as healthy control patients. Cocktails were prepared to mimic concentrations of circulating soluble factors as assessed in healthy and COVID-19-infected patients Liu et al (2020). Each cocktail was applied to vascular endothelial cells (HUVEC) and resulting morphological changes were observed. The resulting high-dimensional phenotype was screened with 1,856 FDA-approved drugs and tool compounds, including benchmark compounds currently being clinically evaluated for COVID-19.

RxRx19b is the first morphological dataset representing inflammatory effects and potential treatments in the context of COVID-19 ARDS. Through RxRx19b, researchers in the scientific community will have access to both the images and the corresponding deep learning embeddings to analyze or apply to their own experimentation. The embeddings are 128-dimensional vectors with one vector for each image and come from Recursion’s internal model trained on additional cell types and perturbation modalities not released here or elsewhere. We provide these embeddings to more easily enable researchers without significant compute resources to still explore and uncover insights from this data. Scientific researchers can use the data to further demonstrate how high-content imaging can be used for compound efficacy screening, and we hope new insights can be derived from this dataset.