NEW YORK – A!maginostic and Singapore's Agency for Science Technology and Research's (A*STAR) Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) on Monday announced a collaboration to establish a joint digital immuno-oncology laboratory.
The lab, located at IMCB and called the IMCB-A!maginostic Joint Lab of Excellence, will provide artificial intelligence- and machine learning-based solutions to support computational digital and multiplex pathology. Its goal is to accelerate and improve the workflow of pathologists, potentially leading to more accurate diagnoses of cancer and the development of new treatments, the partners said.
The lab will build a cloud-based large-scale pathology database of annotated cancer tissue images to develop AI and machine learning algorithms. A!maginostic, a spinoff of A*STAR, has licensed A!HistoNote, a cloud-based digital pathology annotation technology solution from A*ccelerate, the commercialization arm of A*STAR, to develop the database, which will begin with prostate and breast cancers and expand to include other cancers, such as endometrial, liver, and lung cancers.
The lab will provide a complete service solution, including staining, scanning, storage, and the analysis of specimen stained by hematoxylin and eosin, as well as immunohistochemistry and multiplex immunofluorescence. The services being offered include multiplex immunostaining, digital whole-slide image scanning, large data storage and management systems, AI- and machine learning-based image processing and analysis, and informatics and modeling solutions.
A!maginostic and IMCB have inked a three-year memorandum of understanding with Ultivue to support the joint lab's research work. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Ultivue provides kits and reagents for multiplex tissue marker detection and quantification. Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.