NEW YORK — Digital pathology firm HistoIndex said on Tuesday that it has joined an international consortium focused on developing a computational tool for identifying nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) patients at high risk of progressing to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).
The consortium, called INTErPRET-NAFLD, is led by the University of Edinburgh and recently received €750,000 ($910,270) in research funding from Eureka Globalstars, Enterprise Singapore, and Innovate UK, according to Singapore-based HistoIndex.
As part of the consortium, HistoIndex will use its artificial intelligence-based digital pathology platform to image unstained liver biopsy slides from the UK-funded SteatoSite NASH database to measure fibrosis, helping in the identification of NAFLD patients who are fast or slow progressors to NASH.
"By evaluating advanced liver tissue metrics in the context of gene expression signatures and real-world clinical data, we hope to develop a new and actionable tool for predicting disease progression and clinical outcome in NAFLD," Jonathan Fallowfield, a University of Edinburgh researcher and clinical lead of the SteatoSite project, said in a statement. "This could be transformational for clinical care pathways and efficient trial design."