Google Cloud today announced two new customers that will showcase the advantages of its cloud computing infrastructure for the biotech industry.

The new partnerships were announced at the Bio-IT World conference this week, one of the major events on the biotech industry’s calendar. Google Cloud said it’s teaming up with an artificial intelligence startup called Path AI Inc. to advance the potential of AI-powered digital pathology, and also the scientific data and AI cloud provider TetraScience Inc. to speed up drug development and other kinds of scientific research.

PathAI is a leader in the emerging area of AI-powered pathology, and its flagship product is the AISight Intelligent Management System. Its platform is used to develop and fine-tune AI models that can optimize the analysis of patient tissue samples for both diagnostic use cases and clinical trials.

AISight IMS blends PathAI’s algorithms and third-party AI models into a single laboratory workflow and image analysis platform. With it, pathologists and researchers can create and deploy powerful biomarker quantification tools that can potentially improve lab operational efficiency and aid in diagnostic processes such as “disease staging and scoring.”

PathAI is partnering with Google Cloud to bring its platform to more biopharma companies and labs worldwide. According to the startup, it will integrate its platform with Google Cloud’s globally distributed infrastructure to scale its digital pathology and algorithmic capabilities and help its customers to process petabytes of data for large-scale biomarker discovery and clinical studies. In doing this, it will also provide customers with access to Google Cloud’s AI development tools, helping its customers to iterate on their customized AI algorithms.

“We understand the urgent need within the biopharmaceutical industry for secure, scalable solutions in AI-driven drug discovery, laboratory operations, and biomarker quantification,” said Ryan Terry, Google Cloud’s managing director of Healthcare and Life Sciences.

TetraScience has created a platform that takes raw data in various formats from multiple sources, and transforms it into an AI-native format that can be readily used by data scientists and AI algorithms. Its platform is widely used in scientific AI research, where it helps users to accelerate the research and development of new drugs and other healthcare therapies.

By bringing its platform to Google Cloud, TetraScience said scientists will be much better able to deal with the overwhelming volumes of complex, unstructured and proprietary data that’s generated by laboratory informatics tools and instruments, and merge this with third-party research data. Presently, scientists have to do the bulk of this work manually, which means they are, in effect, “human data integrators.”

With TetraScience on Google Cloud, the company can take advantage of Google’s tools to simplify data processing and formatting, so scientists will no longer have to waste their time performing manual, tedious and error-prone tasks. Instead, scientists will be able to focus their energies on the actual insights their work delivers. They’ll be free to leverage the understanding gained through their research to innovate and create new drugs and treatments that can improve and prolong people’s lives.

By combining TetraScience’s platform with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, scientists will be able to unlock insights from “previously dead data.” This should help researchers to identify new drug candidates more quickly, develop novel cell-based therapeutics and digitize critical quality control processes. In addition, the partnership will help to lower the costs of this kind of research, the companies said.

According to Terry, scientific progress has traditionally always been slowed by the problems associated with fragmented data and inefficient workflows. “This collaboration addresses these roadblocks, giving life sciences the practical tools needed to accelerate drug discovery and development,” he said. “By bringing Google Cloud’s data and AI capabilities together with TetraSciences’ proven domain expertise, we hope to empower scientists to find solutions to some of the most pressing health challenges faster than ever before.”

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