Boston-based PathAI is seeking to combine artificial intelligence and pathology. The company’s platform helps pathologists to make quick and accurate diagnosis with automated analysis of tissue and fluid samples. In November 2019, PathAI closed a $75 million Series B round with participation from Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck’s Global Health Innovation Fund, LabCorp, General Catalyst, and General Atlantic.

PathAI says their solutions drive discovery and predictive diagnostics in drug-development as well as accelerating R&D efforts, something that could be valuable during the present COVID-19 pandemic. They are also developing new tools to support the clinical workflow and provide increased insight. 

The company was recently issued its first two patents, which teach predicting a survival time of a patient and predicting tissue characteristics for a pathology image. Both use annotated pathology images to train a model which is able to make future diagnoses.

Also last November, PathAI announced with Gilead the results of analyses examining the severity of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) in liver biopsy samples from patients enrolled in the phase 3 selonsertib studies, which indicated strong correlations between interpretations of the histological features of NASH between their AI model and human pathologists.