MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and PUNE, India, May 23, 2022 /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 tumor histoculture platform that can preserve the entire architecture of the human tumor 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 tumors 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.

Crosscope and Farcast Bio join efforts to reshape oncology landscape.

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 bring 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 tumor 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, Ph.D. said, "Farcast TiME (Tumor immune Microenvironment) is a human tumor microenvironment platform that has demonstrated the preservation of all elements of the human tumor 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."