Cancer pathology software from Lunit, a Korean medical AI company, is headed into pharmaceutical research. A partnership with Discovery Life Sciences, a US laboratory services provider, will fold the company’s SCOPE platform into the tissue analysis workflows that drug development depends on.
Over more than 25 years, Discovery has supplied biomarker services for over 2,000 trial programs, Lunit said, and it supports upwards of 350 clinical trial programs that are active today. Under the agreement, pharma and biotech clients taking part will find Lunit SCOPE embedded in Discovery’s existing tissue processing and biomarker analysis.
AI pathology is not being sold as a service on its own here. Laboratory processes covering tissue collection, preparation, molecular pathology and quantitative analysis are where the two partners will thread the software through. Tissue data that is more consistent and reproducible across clinical and translational programs could follow, the companies say.
Anna Juncker-Jensen, Discovery’s vice president of scientific affairs, framed the issue this way: “The reliability of AI pathology depends on consistent tissue preparation and laboratory workflows.”
Financial terms went undisclosed, as did the participating drugmakers and the number of programs that will use the software at the outset. The step carries Lunit past cancer diagnostics, where digital pathology vendors are already crowded, and into the research market, where biomarker readouts help determine which drugs move forward.
Detecting immune cell distribution and predicting responses to cancer immunotherapy are among the models in Lunit’s SCOPE portfolio, capabilities that line up with the tissue analysis biopharma companies require.
