AI for drug discovery and cellular profiling

Srijit Seal

Principal Scientist at Human Chemical Company and Visiting Researcher at Uppsala University.

I am a researcher in chemoinformatics and computational biology, centered on using machine learning and Cell Painting to study small-molecule bioactivity, image-based profiling, and drug discovery.
I am Principal Scientist at Human Chemical Company and Visiting Researcher at Uppsala University. Previously, I was Senior Scientist at Merck US and completed my postdoc at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard where I was advised by Anne Carpenter and Shantanu Singh.
I obtained my PhD from the University of Cambridge where I was advised by Andreas Bender. I also serve on the Board of Directors at the American Society for Cellular and Computational Toxicology and the Editorial Board of the Journal of Cheminformatics.

AI for Science Cell Painting Bioactivity Modeling Cheminformatics Drug Discovery

Selected work

Featured Research

Speaking

Talks & Workshops

September 2026

BioTechX USA 2026

AI/ML for Toxicology Pipelines

Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA, US
March 2026

MCBIOS Annual Conference

From Data to Detection: AI-Driven Frameworks for Adverse Event Prediction

Tampa, FL, US
October 2025

Food Standards Agency Workshop

Machine Learning for Toxicity Prediction Using Chemical Structures: Pillars for Success in the Real World

London, UK
May 2025

University of Delaware

GTA Annual Meeting: The Last Mile: Opportunities to Bridge Research and Increase Impact in Human and Environmental Health Science

Newark, DE, US
March 2025

Society of Toxicology (SOT)

Using Generative AI to ‘Turn’ Safe but Inactive Molecules into Effective Ligands

Orlando, Florida, US
April 2024

ODSC East Conference 2024

Machine Learning in Drug Discovery: How Not to Lie with Computational Models?

Cambridge, US

Open resources

Tutorials & Tools

Course

Introduction to Cheminformatics and AI in Drug Discovery

Hands-on modeling workflows, predictive ML, and AI-assisted cheminformatics.

Open course
New tutorial

Leveraging Cell Painting Morphological Profiles for Machine Learning–Driven Bioactivity Prediction

Practical workflow for turning morphology profiles into bioactivity prediction features.

Open tutorial
Tool use

Tool Calling in Cheminformatics

Hands-on introduction to tool-using workflows for chemistry data tasks.

Open notebook
Tools

Drug Discovery and Toxicology Utilities

Small, reusable tools for cheminformatics, Cell Painting, and reproducible research workflows.

Browse tools

Publications

Recent Publications

AI agents in drug discovery: applications and case studies

AI agents in drug discovery: applications and case studies

Dinh Long Huynh, Srijit Seal, Dylan Reid, Anne E. Carpenter, Andreas Bender, Ola Spjuth, AIA4S Consortium
Drug Discovery Today, 2026
Transfer learning enables discovery of sub-micromolar antibacterials for ESKAPE pathogens from ultra-large chemical spaces

Transfer learning enables discovery of sub-micromolar antibacterials for ESKAPE pathogens from ultra-large chemical spaces

Miguel García-Ortegón, Srijit Seal, Emily Geddes, Jenny L. Littler, Collette S. Guy, Jonathan Whiteside, Carl Rasmussen, Andreas Bender, Sergio Bacallado
Chemical Science, 2025
Learning Molecular Representation in a Cell

Learning Molecular Representation in a Cell

Gang Liu, Srijit Seal, John Arevalo, Zhenwen Liang, Anne E. Carpenter, Meng Jiang, Shantanu Singh
ICLR, 2025
Progress and new challenges in image-based profiling

Progress and new challenges in image-based profiling

E. Serrano, J. Peters, J. Wagner, R.E. Graham, Z. Chen, B. Feng, G. Miranda, Alexandr A. Kalinin, Loan Vulliard, Jenna Tomkinson, Cameron Mattson, Michael J. Lippincott, Ziqi Kang, Divya Sitani, Dave Bunten, Srijit Seal, Neil O. Carragher, Anne E. Carpenter, Shantanu Singh, Paula A. Marin Zapata, Juan C. Caicedo, Gregory P. Way
Molecular Systems Biology, 2026
Machine Learning for Toxicity Prediction Using Chemical Structures: Pillars for Success in the Real World

Machine Learning for Toxicity Prediction Using Chemical Structures: Pillars for Success in the Real World

Srijit Seal, Manas Mahale, Miguel García-Ortegón, Chaitanya Joshi, Layla Hosseini Gerami, Alex Beatson, Matthew Greenig, Mrinal Shekhar, Arijit Patra, Caroline Weis, Arash Mehrjou, Adrien Badré, Brianna Paisley, Rhiannon Lowe, Shantanu Singh, Falgun Shah, Bjarki Johannesson, Dominic Williams, David Rouquie, Djork-Arné Clevert, Patrick Schwab, Nicola Richmond, Christos A. Nicolaou, Raymond J. Gonzalez, Andreas Bender
Chemical Research in Toxicology, 2025
Counting cells can accurately predict small-molecule bioactivity benchmarks

Counting cells can accurately predict small-molecule bioactivity benchmarks

Srijit Seal, W. Dee, A. Shah, Natacha Cerisier, A. Zhang, Esteban Miglietta, K.L. Titterton, Á.A. Cabrera, D.A. Boiko, Alex Beatson, Gregory Slabaugh, Olivier Taboureau, Jordi Carreras Puigvert, Shantanu Singh, Ola Spjuth, Andreas Bender, Anne E. Carpenter
Nature Communications, 2026
Cell Painting for cytotoxicity and mode-of-action analysis in primary human hepatocytes

Cell Painting for cytotoxicity and mode-of-action analysis in primary human hepatocytes

J.D. Ewald, K.L. Titterton, A. Bäuerle, Alex Beatson, D.A. Boiko, Á.A. Cabrera, Jaime Cheah, Beth Cimini, Bram Gorissen, Joshua Harrill, Thouis Jones, Konrad Karczewski, Christine Crute, David Rouquie, Srijit Seal, Erin Weisbart, Brandon White, Anne E. Carpenter, Shantanu Singh
Cell Systems, 2026
Advice for Bad Computational Toxicologists

Advice for Bad Computational Toxicologists

Srijit Seal, Thomas Hartung
NAM Journal, 2025
Cell Painting: a decade of discovery and innovation in cellular imaging

Cell Painting: a decade of discovery and innovation in cellular imaging

Srijit Seal, Marianna Trapotsi, Ola Spjuth, Jordi Carreras Puigvert, Nigel Greene, Shantanu Singh, Andreas Bender, Anne E. Carpenter
Nature Methods, 2024
Insights into Drug Cardiotoxicity from Biological and Chemical Data: The First Public Classifiers for FDA Drug-Induced Cardiotoxicity Rank

Insights into Drug Cardiotoxicity from Biological and Chemical Data: The First Public Classifiers for FDA Drug-Induced Cardiotoxicity Rank

Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, 2024
Integrating Cell Morphology with Gene Expression and Chemical Structure to aid Mitochondrial Toxicity detection

Integrating Cell Morphology with Gene Expression and Chemical Structure to aid Mitochondrial Toxicity detection

Srijit Seal, Jordi Carreras Puigvert, Marianna Trapotsi, Yang Hongbin, Ola Spjuth, Andreas Bender
Communications Biology, 2022
Comparison of Cellular Morphological descriptors and Molecular Fingerprints for the prediction of Cytotoxicity- and Proliferation-related assays

Comparison of Cellular Morphological descriptors and Molecular Fingerprints for the prediction of Cytotoxicity- and Proliferation-related assays

Srijit Seal, Yang Hongbin, Luis Vollmers, Andreas Bender
Chemical Research in Toxicology, 2021
Earlier Publications
Understanding Biology in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Understanding Biology in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Elsa Lawrence, Adham El-Shazly, Srijit Seal, Chaitanya Joshi, Pietro Lio, Shantanu Singh, Andreas Bender, Pietro Sormanni, Matthew Greenig
arXiv, 2024
Using Chemical and Biological data to Predict Drug Toxicity

Using Chemical and Biological data to Predict Drug Toxicity

Anika Liu, Srijit Seal, Yang Hongbin, Andreas Bender
SLAS Discovery, 2023
Merging Bioactivity Predictions from Cell Morphology and Chemical Fingerprint models using Similarity to Training data

Merging Bioactivity Predictions from Cell Morphology and Chemical Fingerprint models using Similarity to Training data

Srijit Seal, Yang Hongbin, Marianna Trapotsi, Shantanu Singh, Jordi Carreras Puigvert, Ola Spjuth, Andreas Bender
Journal of Cheminformatics, 2023
From pixels to phenotypes: Integrating image-based profiling with cell health data as BioMorph features improves interpretability

From pixels to phenotypes: Integrating image-based profiling with cell health data as BioMorph features improves interpretability

Molecular Biology of the Cell, 2024
Using Generative Modeling to Endow with Potency Initially Inert Compounds with Good Bioavailability and Low Toxicity

Using Generative Modeling to Endow with Potency Initially Inert Compounds with Good Bioavailability and Low Toxicity

Robert Horne, Jared Wilson-Godber, Alicia Gonzalez Diaz, Z. Faidon Brotzakis, Srijit Seal, Rebecca C. Gregory, Andrea Possenti, Sean Chia, Michele Vendruscolo
Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, 2024
Improved Detection of Drug-Induced Liver Injury by Integrating Predicted In Vivo and In Vitro Data

Improved Detection of Drug-Induced Liver Injury by Integrating Predicted In Vivo and In Vitro Data

Srijit Seal, Dominic Williams, Layla Hosseini Gerami, Manas Mahale, Anne E. Carpenter, Ola Spjuth, Andreas Bender
Chemical Research in Toxicology, 2024
PKSmart: an open-source computational model to predict intravenous pharmacokinetics of small molecules

PKSmart: an open-source computational model to predict intravenous pharmacokinetics of small molecules

Srijit Seal, Marianna Trapotsi, Manas Mahale, Vigneshwari Subramanian, Nigel Greene, Ola Spjuth, Andreas Bender
Journal of Cheminformatics, 2025
Calibrated prediction of scarce adverse drug reaction labels with conditional neural processes

Calibrated prediction of scarce adverse drug reaction labels with conditional neural processes

ICLR 2024 DMLR Workshop

Updates

News

pip install infoalign! Add biological information to your chemical fingerprints, using only SMILES as input! Our paper Learning Molecular Representation in a Cell has been accepted to ICLR 2025! We introduce InfoAlign, a new approach for learning molecular representations from cellular response data, integrating features like cell morphology and gene expression. By combining information bottleneck methods with context graphs, we’re able to extract minimal yet sufficient representations of molecules that lead to better predictions and generalization in downstream tasks like molecular property prediction and zero-shot molecule-morphology matching.