Crosscope and Farcast Biosciences join efforts to reshape the precision oncology landscape via AI-powered pathology

Mountain View (California) [US]/Pune (Maharashtra) [India], May 23 (ANI/PRNewswire): Today marks the beginning of a new era in the field of cancer diagnosis and precision medicine with the coming together of two leading organizations Crosscope Inc, a Silicon Valley-based leader and provider of Vendor Agnostic AI-enabled digital pathology platform, and Farcast Bioscience LLC, a Florida based company.
Farcast has 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 & analysis, and at the same time be used to improve the assessment of standard pathological features.
AI and machine learning have shown promising results in several domains in the field of healthcare. The application of Crosscope's proprietary technology and algorithm 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 digitization of pathology.
Digital pathology uses predefined algorithms to generate consistent and faster histopathological analysis which has brought 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 digitized 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 OrionAI™ is dedicated to accurately detecting and evaluating clinically relevant findings in digitized slides from cancer biopsies. This collaboration will improve the power of digital transformation in accelerating drug discovery and driving new breakthroughs which will help in 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 of Crosscope.
Farcast Biosciences CSO, Satish Sankaran, PhD said, "Farcast TiME (Tumor 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.
Digitization and AI-based histopathology assessment will go a long way in improving the speed, efficiency, and robustness of our pathology workflows."
Mohit Malhotra, CEO of 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."
Farcast Biosciences's unique and proprietary technology uses fresh human tumour samples cultured in a proven system that recreates TiME (Tumor immune MicroEnvironment) ex vivo.
The culture system maintains morphology and viability while retaining native tumour architecture and immune components to enable the evaluation of tumour response to drug treatment.
Farcast works with IRB approved cancer centers to access fresh tumour samples from informed donors after obtaining their consent. Farcast TiME can evaluate therapeutic response across many drug categories including bi-specific antibodies, monoclonal antibodies, small molecules, and oncolytic viruses in a relatively short period of time.
Farcast offers a wide array of kinetic, and end-point assays for multi-dimensional analysis of mechanistic action and impact of therapeutic agents on tumour micro-environment in a cost-effective manner.
Contact | Communications Manager | Email: biopharma@farcastbio.com
For more information visit: https://www.farcastbio.com/ or connect on Linkedin
Crosscope; abbreviated for "Computational Microscope" is a medical AI software company on a mission to radically transform patient care by unlocking the power of AI.
The company's Crosscope Dx software is a digital pathology platform to facilitate deploying scalable Artificial Intelligence and Computational Pathology tools to empower pathology laboratories with precision diagnostics.
Crosscope's team of engineers, data scientists, and pathologists is developing a unique platform and AI approach to deliver efficient pathology workflows for increased diagnostic accuracy and productivity.
Contact | Press Secretary | Email: media@crosscope.com
For more information visit: www.crosscope.com or connect on LinkedIn and Twitter
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