Cancer treatment increasingly depends on tests that tell a clinician which therapy a given patient should receive, and two diagnostics companies are betting that artificial intelligence can shorten the path from the research bench to an approved assay.
CellCarta and Imagene AI said on October 1, 2026 that they are broadening a collaboration built to hand drugmakers one coordinated route for validating, deploying and scaling AI biomarker and companion diagnostic work. Announced from Montreal and Miami, the tie-up joins Imagene AI’s pathology algorithms with CellCarta’s laboratory network and clinical-diagnostics experience, and the companies report that programs with two global pharmaceutical manufacturers are already running.
One of those programs is an AI-powered immunohistochemistry companion diagnostic. The other applies Imagene AI’s Lung Prediction Panel to non-small cell lung cancer. More information is promised over the coming months, though the companies have not said when either effort might reach regulators.
Imagene AI’s oncology intelligence leans on quantitative pathology AI, reading tissue at the level of individual cells and their substructures, scoring samples both continuously and by location, and sorting patients into groups. Its multi-gene lung panel aims to pull key NSCLC markers out of routine H&E whole-slide images in minutes.
CellCarta supplies fit-for-purpose analytical validation, the infrastructure to run trials worldwide, and regulatory know-how. Companion diagnostics sit in a tightly policed category, where an assay has to prove it reliably identifies patients likely to respond to one specific therapy. Marrying rapid AI pathology to formal validation is the crux of the effort.
