Lunit, a leading provider of AI-driven solutions for cancer diagnostics and therapeutics, has recently announced a strategic research partnership with The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The primary focus of this collaborative research initiative is to investigate the effectiveness of Merck’s immunotherapy drug, Keytruda (known as MSD outside the US and Canada), in treating various types of cancer. Lunit intends to leverage its proprietary AI solution, Lunit SCOPE IO, for in-depth tissue data analysis within the study.
The core objective of this joint effort is to employ AI technology to enhance patient data analysis and to optimize the utilization of cancer treatment, particularly in patients with different cancer types. One of the main challenges in the field of immunotherapy is the lack of reliable biomarkers, and conventional methods have their limitations. The dynamic landscape of cancer research is increasingly reliant on state-of-the-art technologies like AI to identify novel biomarkers.
Notably, Lunit SCOPE IO has undergone extensive training, utilizing a vast dataset of over 500,000 H&E slides and more than 10 million cell annotations collected from a diverse group of over 150 pathologists. This AI tool is proficient in recognizing cancerous regions, stromal tissue, and tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), which are pivotal in the context of immunotherapy. Among its multifaceted capabilities, SCOPE IO can generate immune phenotype maps based on TIL density in the tumor microenvironment and supports analyses for over 16 different cancer types.
