The long, arduous process of narrowing down millions of chemical compounds to just a select few that can be further developed into mature drugs, may soon be shortened, thanks to new artificial intelligence (AI) software. Genedata, a bioinformatics solutions company headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, has created Imagence, a high content screening image analysis workflow based on deep learning that cuts image analysis times, while increasing data quality and reproducibility of results. "We have software systems which can more or less analyze almost every assay that you need there, can construct and organize the data, store the data, federate the data and make a decisions along this process," said Stephen Steigele, the head of science at Genedata said in an exclusive interview with R&D Magazine "What we have now specifically solved is we developed a software where we use artificial intelligence to make a part of this research process extremely easy." The task of analyzing high content screening images is often labor-intensive and time-consuming, involving several different levels of expertise with several manual steps, like the selection of extracted features or correct detection of cells. This process, which can take many weeks, is reduced to only a few hours using the new technology.