Yusuf Roohani, a PhD at Stanford University, has just been awarded the 2023 SLAS Innovation Award for his presentation on “GEARS: Predicting Transcriptional Outcomes of Novel Multi-Gene Perturbations”. One of six awards given each year by the Society of Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS), the Innovation Award recognizes outstanding achievement and creativity in the field of laboratory automation and screening.
Roohani’s presentation covered the possibilities of using GEARS to predict transcriptional responses to both single and multi-gene perturbations using single-cell RNA sequencing data. Using GEARS, researchers can predict the outcomes of perturbing combinations of novel genes that were never experimentally perturbed by leveraging deep learning and a knowledge of gene-gene relationships. With a higher precision than existing approaches, GEARS can identify the strongest interactions more than twice as well as prior approaches.
The award is an example of the integration of industry and academia in the field of laboratory automation and helps fuel further scientific growth and development for young scientists. Roohani stated that he was “honored to be recognized by the SLAS community which is really one of a kind in how it bridges the gap between drug discovery research in industry and academia”.
The SLAS Innovation Award is sponsored by HighRes Biosolutions, a leading global laboratory automation company, and is attached to a $10,000 cash prize. HighRes Biosolutions creates tools and platforms that enable scientists to develop data factories connecting their instrumentation with informatics for unprecedented levels of productivity, (re)adapting to changes in science, technology, and organizational structure – wherever in the world they may be.