In Tuesday's business news, January 13, Astrazeneca announces it is acquiring Modella AI.
Here's some background (Chat GPT 5) about Modella:
- Modella AI is a Boston-based biomedical artificial intelligence company focused on transforming medical imaging, diagnostic workflows, and therapeutic discovery through advanced AI models.
- Emerging from academic research at institutions like Harvard Medical School and Mass General Brigham, Modella AI came out of stealth with multimodal foundation models and generative AI “co-pilots”—tools that combine visual pathology data with clinical context to support tasks like disease detection, report summarization, and prognosis prediction for clinicians and researchers.
- Its flagship offerings (such as PathChat and Judith) are designed to augment pathologists’ capabilities by automating routine analysis and enabling rich, AI-assisted interpretation of complex biomedical data.
- Modella positions itself at the intersection of AI research, clinical workflows, and diagnostics, partnering with healthcare and laboratory platforms to integrate its technology and improve efficiency and accuracy in pathology and oncology research workflows.
Here are some news sources: Reuters here. Modella press release here. Here is the Modella AI page at Linked In, where you can track real-time comments about the acquisition (here).
The news in brief:
- AstraZeneca has acquired Modella AI, a Boston-based biomedical AI company, deepening a collaboration that began with a multi-year partnership in July 2025. The goal is to integrate Modella’s multimodal foundation models and AI agents directly into AstraZeneca’s global oncology R&D organization to accelerate clinical development, improve biomarker discovery, and support more data-driven decision-making across AstraZeneca’s cancer pipeline.
- Modella’s technology sits at the intersection of pathology, clinical data, and generative AI, allowing it to analyze and integrate complex datasets from slides, patients, and trials. By being acquired rather than merely partnered, Modella’s AI platform will now be embedded inside AstraZeneca’s internal research ecosystem, enabling automation, consistency, and scalability across oncology workflows—from discovery through clinical trials.
- Both companies emphasized that the combination is designed to turn advanced AI methods into real-world impact for cancer patients, though financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
More about AZ
Astrazeneca is staking out a leadership role in applied AI in biopharma. Here's the AZ webpage on computational pathology and its unique system, called QCS, which is being used in FDA-track drug trials for biomarkers like TROP2. A Roche-Ventana TROP2 IVD has won FDA breakthrough status in 2025 - here, here, here.
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FDA, Drugs, Digital Pathology
PATHAI has FDA-endorsed digital pathology assays to be used in liver (MASH) drug trials - here.
PATHAI has FDA-endorsed digital pathology assays to be used in liver (MASH) drug trials - here.
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Ventana RUO?
I saw an announcement in the past month that Roche/Ventana would release an RUO QCS TROP2 biomarker for research; I couldn't find it this morning (in fact, my January 9 bookmark from LinkedIn had become a dead link). Expect more on that later.
I saw an announcement in the past month that Roche/Ventana would release an RUO QCS TROP2 biomarker for research; I couldn't find it this morning (in fact, my January 9 bookmark from LinkedIn had become a dead link). Expect more on that later.
