Verily’s New Collaboration to Change Prostate Cancer Digital Pathology

Collaboration is a commonality for Verily Life Sciences, an Alphabet Company. Throughout the years, Verily – even when it was known as the life sciences arm of Google - has worked with a number of medtech firms to treat or manage different diseases.

The South San Francisco, CA-based company is maintaining the trend in 2022 and announced it is working with Lumea, a digital pathology specialist.

The agreement between the two companies will bring together Verily’s artificial intelligence algorithms with Lumea’s end-to-end digital pathology platform with the objective to develop products that can diagnose, prognose, and guide prostate cancer therapy selection with improved objectivity and efficiency.

Currently, pathologists use the Gleason grading system to analyze tissue growth patterns and aggressiveness. However, new research has shown AI systems could help provide more accurate and optimal outcomes.

Verily said it has developed AI systems for digital pathology to reduce variability and maximize insights from biopsy tissue samples. The Alphabet company said its approach enables a new way to understand cancer by eliminating variability, generating more information with less tissue, and providing advanced computation to empower both researchers and clinicians.

“Verily’s Digital Pathology technologies have the promise to provide more efficient and valuable techniques to democratize access to precision oncology” said Jessica Mega, MD, MPH, Verily Chief Medical & Scientific Officer, Co-Founder. “Lumea’s integrated digital pathology solution was the ideal technology platform for us to validate our artificial intelligence method to improve cancer detection and grading.”