Agilent Technologies and the University of California San Diego agreed to collaborate to establish the Agilent Center of Excellence (CoE) in Cellular Intelligence, which is located at UC San Diego’s School of Medicine. The goal is to foster collaboration and innovation among researchers from Agilent and UC San Diego, and other institutions and industry partners.
The CoE will serve as a hub for academic and pharma/biopharma researchers in the region, enabling access to vital analytical instrumentation and providing education, training, and application development opportunities, according to Mike McMullen, Agilent president and CEO.
“This important initiative will improve our understanding of disease mechanisms at the cellular level—and drive the development of better methods for editing and engineering cells to treat diseases, enhance immunity, and create novel bioproducts,” says McMullen.
Supporting transdisciplinary initiative
The CoE will focus on leveraging Agilent instrumentation, including cell analysis and mass spectroscopy solutions, to support transdisciplinary initiative: Decode Eukaryotic Cellular Intelligence, a research program that aims to understand how eukaryotic cells sense, decide, and act in complex and uncertain environments, with implications for health and disease.
“We are thrilled to partner with Agilent to launch the Agilent CoE in Cellular Intelligence at UC San Diego, which will advance our understanding of the fundamental principles of life and the origin of biological complexity,” adds Pradipta Ghosh, MD, professor of medicine and cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego and founding director of the program.
The CoE is based on the hypothesis that eukaryotic cells function as deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents that use interlinked switch circuits of biological intelligence to adapt and survive. It combines experimental, computational, and theoretical approaches to decode the molecular and cellular mechanisms of these switch circuits and explore their implications for health and disease.
