Phenotype to Function: Predicting drug mode of action from behavioural fingerprints

Pesticides and anthelmintics (nematode-killing drugs) are discovered through phenotypic screens in target species. This means that their efficacy is often known early in the development pipeline, but their mode of action is not. Therefore, an important problem in developing new compounds to combat the rise of anthelmintic resistance is determining their mode of action. We record multiple worms from 96-well plates using a multi-camera imaging system and extract behavioural features from tracked animals to define a quantitative phenotype for each well in response to a library of ~80 drugs from 10 known mode of action classes. Because drug dose can have a strong effect on behavioural response, we record worms' response to a range of doses. We combine information across doses using multiple-instance learning to predict a compound's mode of action on unseen data.