California: Crosscope Inc. and Farcast Bioscience LLC have developed a unique and differentiated human tumour histoculture platform that can preserve the entire architecture of the human tumour microenvironment.
The two companies will work together for the prospective evaluation of OrionAI—a revolutionary AI-based Diagnostic Assistant for Histological Examination of a variety of solid tumours, beginning with Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma (HNSCC) Cancer.
HNSCC is the most prevalent cancer in India, and both companies have decided to enter into a collaboration to tackle a disease that presents a unique healthcare challenge for India. This partnership will help researchers to collaborate, centrally review, facilitate training, image viewing and analysis, and at the same time be used to improve the assessment of standard pathological features.
In the field of healthcare, AI and machine learning have shown promising results in several domains. The application of Crosscope’s proprietary technology and algorithms holds immense promise in tackling the global cancer burden. There exists a massive supply gap in the number of trained pathologists required in the way workflows are set up across the world. By augmenting the capacity of pathologists, Crosscope and Farcast aim to accelerate the speed of diagnosis, significantly reducing turnaround times (TAT) and bringing down the rate of misdiagnosis by leveraging the digitisation of pathology.
Digital pathology uses predefined algorithms to generate consistent and faster histopathological analysis, which has led to significant progress in the quantification and identification of different markers capable of predicting the progression of the disease, patient prognosis, and therapy response. The combination of digital pathology with other emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, shows a strong promise for identifying predictive biomarkers for several cancer types.
The main objective of this collaboration is to assess the ability of Crosscope’s cutting-edge deep learning technology to detect and quantify the major tumour pathology hallmarks from digitised H&E slides and study their correlation and accuracy when compared with trained pathologists’ assessment.
This will further showcase the performance of Crosscope’s algorithms that are adaptable to independent test cohorts, images, and varying slide tissue content, making it a flexible, general-purpose, and adaptable method in both clinical and research settings.
“Crosscope’s deep learning-based OrionAITM is dedicated to accurately detecting and evaluating clinically relevant findings in digitised slides from cancer biopsies.This collaboration will improve the power of digital transformation in accelerating drug discovery and driving new breakthroughs, which will help with a better cancer diagnosis. We are excited to work together with Mohit and his team at Farcast Biosciences to bring advanced tools for precision diagnostics,” said Dr Jayendra Shinde, CEO, Crosscope.
Satish Sankaran, CSO, Farcast Biosciences, said, “Farcast TiME (Tumour Immune Microenvironment) is a human tumour microenvironment platform that has demonstrated the preservation of all elements of the human tumour microenvironment for up to 72 hours. Digitisation and AI-based histopathology assessment will go a long way in improving the speed, efficiency, and robustness of our pathology workflows.”
Mohit Malhotra, CEO, Farcast Biosciences, added, “Histopathology is one of the pillars of our multidimensional assay system. In our work with leading global biotech companies, this collaboration could help drive deeper insights for our customers, leading to better-informed choices about their pipeline candidates.”
