Dr. Kelly Pittman is Ramona’s Scientific Product Manager. Her background is in microbiology and parasitology, but she ultimately transitioned into the field of cancer biology where she is focused on patient derived organoids as a model for novel drug screening. One major biological problem she is interested in solving is how to make 3D live cell imaging more feasible at the scale required for high throughput screening. We sat down to discuss her work and what excites her about the field of cell biology today.
Q: Tell us about your background and how you ended up in the field that you’re in now.
Kelly: My background is actually very diverse because I’ve always had an incredibly wide interest in biology. My route as a scientist started in undergrad at Georgia State University. I started using microscopy back during my first project where I was working on E. coli, and we were specifically interested in how large colonies, biofilms, of bacteria communicate with one another. With that project, we were interested in understanding the specific genes within the bacteria that help regulate how they talk to each other and form structures. We used confocal microscopy to image the bacterial biofilms and then knocked out specific genes to see how they influenced the 3-dimensional biostructure.
With that, I got incredibly interested in biology and the field of microscopy. One of the projects I worked on in my PhD program was understanding the mechanisms of cell division. That required using confocal microscopy to do live cell imaging of C. elegans embryos using a similar principle as before of knocking out different genes and seeing how cell division is disrupted in that process. I built on all of the foundations that I learned in microbiology and cell biology and then eventually went into parasitology in my next project in grad school where I worked with Toxoplasma gondii.
Eventually, I transitioned into cancer biology and focused on patient derived organoid models for drug screening prior to coming to Ramona Optics where I’m helping to launch the cell culture aspects of their imaging processes. That’s an abbreviated version of the 15-year journey I’ve had.
Q: What are some of the things that you are most excited about in the field of cell culture?
Kelly: What I’m most excited about is how far research has come in terms of being able to culture human samples directly from patients so that we can better understand the individual mechanisms of cancer biology. A lot of progress has been made in terms of being able to take a tumor from a patient and actually grow it directly, and not only grow the cancer cells but also preserve the immune component of the tumor so we can better understand how different drugs can impact the tumor microenvironment and how we can impact the immune system’s regulation of cancer. I think that’s one of the most exciting components of cell biology that I’ve seen lately. In general, just the ability to culture a much more biologically relevant subset of cells — whether for cancer biology, neurobiology, toxicology — there’s been a lot of developments that I think are going to really transform how we do studies.
Q: With that being said, is there a specific capability of Ramona’s system that you think is most interesting or relevant to apply to cell biology?
Kelly: Absolutely, I think the wide field of view is super advantageous because it not only lets you capture a lot of biology at once but it also speeds up the processing time of imaging. Processing time can be extremely prohibitive for a lot of the different screens that are going on right now — large compound screens that are needed for drug development. When you’re trying to test 10,000 compounds to see what is going to be most advantageous to push forward in a clinical trial, the ability to move quickly is imperative. So, I think Ramona’s technology will really propel that forward. Not only on the MCAM system but also what Ramons has developed in software. The ability to quickly analyze and comb through data is going to be next-level for drug discovery.
Q: Tell me about those compounds, what does testing those entail?
Kelly: So, there are different classes of compounds. My background for compound screening is largely in cancer biology. There are two major classes, there are small molecule inhibitors — they’re just really small chemical compounds that will target very specific proteins in the cancer cell pathway. The other class of compounds are immuno-therapies, and one of the largest classes are immune checkpoint inhibitors. They are often engineered proteins, which are much larger than the small molecule compounds I mentioned earlier and they’re used to regulate how your immune system is responding to your own individual cancer. So those are the two major types of compounds that are being used. They often are temperature sensitive, and so it’s important that when you’re doing screening that you’re able to kind of keep the biologically relevant temperature going while you’re doing those imaging experiments.
Q: Regarding what you said earlier about Ramona’s software, what is an example of a capability that you foresee as being useful to researchers in this field?
Kelly: One of the things that I am excited about helping Ramona develop is the ability to identify whether a cell is alive or dead within a culture without the use of dyes. The reason that is important is because there’s a lot of dyes available on the market, and those dyes can be used to label live versus dead cells, but often those dyes either have a major biological impact on the cells long-term, or they fade dramatically over time and make the analysis very difficult to interpret. So, what I’m envisioning for some of the baseline aspects of what Ramona is going to develop in the cell culture field is dye-free analysis for drug screening. That way, you can have your cancer cells in any type of plate format you’re interested in, screen a multitude of compounds, and actually just with a brightfield image, have the software tell you what that compound has done to the cell viability.
Q: What other things are you interested in, what do you like to do in your free time?
Kelly: Oh, hobbies! Oh, those. I have those sometimes. One of my biggest hobbies is biking. I really like to ride my bike on the American Tobacco Trail, or the Cary Greenway. It’s one of my favorite pastimes. I also just really enjoy going on long walks with my dog, spending time with her. She’s a big part of my life, as well as spending time with my significant other and my friends and family.
