Schistosomiasis drug discovery runs on phenotypic plates, not on models, because the parasite changes its drug sensitivity as it matures. Imaging and machine learning speed up the reading of those plates. They cannot repair a plate that was read badly. This piece follows the readouts stage by stage, weighs three well-known platforms, and sets out the reporting fields that make data reusable. Why praziquantel sets the screening bar in schistosomiasis drug discovery Praziquantel has been in use since the 1970s. Four decades on, it is still the only therapy deployed at scale. That is why it shows up in nearly every anti-schistosomal assay as the positive control and as the compound a ranking model is trained against. It is also a narrow drug. It hits adult worms. It does little to juvenile or migrating schistosomula. The narrowness sets the bar. A plate that runs only on larvae will miss a compound that works on adults. A plate that runs only on adults is too slow to screen at scale. So e...
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