An innovative new tool known as CellPyAbility was recently developed by James Elia, a doctoral candidate studying in the lab of Ranjit Bindra, MD, PhD. This pioneering application is designed to simplify and enhance the analysis of cell viability data, making the process more efficient and accessible to researchers worldwide. CellPyAbility uses Python programming to automate data analysis and enable users to quickly process large datasets. It also generates various metrics and visualizations, creating high-quality figures for publications.

Assessing cell viability and proliferation in response to chemical gradients is fundamental to cancer biology research. “We provide a cell viability ‘toolkit’ that includes detailed protocols for high-throughput assays in response to a single agent or a combination of two agents at varying concentrations with several advantages over other methods,” says Elia.

“Additionally, we developed automated software that seamlessly integrates with the provided protocols and outputs detailed tabular and graphical analyses of experiments from bulk raw images. This combined approach significantly lowers the barriers to implementing cell viability assays by simplifying experimental setup and accelerating data analysis.”

“By making tools like these open-access, we aim to empower cancer researchers with a streamlined, user-friendly platform for the rapid assessment of single- and dual-agent therapies in cell line models,” says Elia.

The software is freely available and can be run as a Windows application or in Python. Elia is also planning to publish the software and protocols in a journal for more streamlined usage, and recently presented a poster highlighting its capabilities at the 2025 annual American Association for Cancer Research meeting. Sam Friedman, a former staff bioinformatician and a current computational research support analyst at Yale, was a senior s

Elia is the chief graduate student for the Yale Pathology and Molecular Medicine PhD Program. His research focuses on the development of DNA-damaging agents to target tumor-specific DNA repair deficiencies. The Bindra Lab centers on collaborations with undergraduate, graduate, and medical school students, as well as post-doctoral researchers and fellows, to conduct bench-to-bedside research, highlighting the ongoing commitment of Yale Cancer Center and Smilow Cancer Hospital to advance cancer research.

Visit https://github.com/bindralab/CellPyAbility for more information.