Accelerating discovery research through bioimaging
Bioimaging drives scientific innovation and discovery. It enables advances in understanding across biological scales – from molecules and cells to organ systems and whole organisms.
To explore how best to support this progress and its potential to improve health, Wellcome convened a meeting in March 2025 of newly funded researchers and leading experts in the field. This report outlines insights from attendees on overcoming barriers and advancing imaging technologies to answer some of the most ambitious research questions that cannot be tackled with the current state of the arts.
Report at a glance
- Published:
- 17 December 2025
- Strategic programme:
- What's inside:
- Insights from the Wellcome Bioimaging Meeting on overcoming barriers and advancing imaging technologies. Key ambitions include improving data standards, integrating AI and ensuring equitable access to accelerate discovery.
- Who this is for:
- Researchers, funders, technologists and industry partners
- Creative commons:
Summary
Discussions at the bioimaging meeting were framed around Wellcome’s three high-level objectives: enhancing resolution across scales; ensuring data and software are FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable); and promoting equitable access to novel imaging methodologies.
Barriers to progress
Attendees highlighted several systemic obstacles to advances in bioimaging:
- insufficient integration: the lack of integration across imaging modalities hinders the ability to capture structure, chemistry, and function in a unified framework
- inadequate data standardisation and federation: hinders interoperability and reproducibility
- lack of support for technologists: the expertise of technologists is critical to sustaining innovation.
Other challenges include high costs, complex sample preparation, and limited data-sharing practices. These issues are deeply interlinked, underscoring the need for coordinated, interdisciplinary solutions.
In response to these barriers, attendees established key ambitions that together represent a roadmap for progress in the next 10 years of bioimaging.
Key ambitions
Seeing across scales of life
- Develop multimodal imaging methods capable of spanning from molecules to entire tissues, including challenging samples such as brain or bone marrow, at nanometre-scale resolution.
- Create minimally invasive probes and labelling strategies to observe living systems without disturbing them.
- Harness advanced technologies, including quantum-enabled microscopy, to capture cellular dynamics in real time and at single-molecule resolution.
Next steps
Realising the community’s shared ambitions will require collective effort, as no single stakeholder can achieve them alone:
- researchers should drive innovation, foster interdisciplinary collaboration and share knowledge and data openly
- industry must develop robust, user-friendly and scalable tools that bridge discovery and application
- funders need to provide sustained support, incentivise open science and ensure equitable access to infrastructure, training and careers
Wellcome is committed to keeping dialogue open with the community and supporting bold, collaborative approaches through its bioimaging programme and broader mechanisms offered by its open mode funding schemes.
If achieved, the ambitions expressed in this report will not only accelerate scientific discovery but could also redefine what is possible in biology, medicine and global health.
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Contact us
If you have any questions about this report, please contact Wellcome's Discovery Research team.