The funding was led by Vivo Capital and included other investors: venBio, Asahi Kasei and Jon Oringer.
HistoWiz, with offices in New York and Miami, targets customers in academia and industry. It has been working with the likes of GSK and Regeneron as well as many “hot biotechs” in San Francisco and Boston.
Through automation and AI, it is aiming to become the global leader in histopathology to accelerate cancer research and drug discovery.
“Our mission is to help researchers find cures by accelerating histopathology and enabling global collaboration.
“The Series A financing will allow HistoWiz to expand our services, build a flagship lab with the latest tissue-sectioning and embedding robots, grow our team to better serve clients, and continue to innovate in this field,” said Dr Ke Cheng, founder and CEO of HistoWiz.
Automation
HistoWiz automates histopathology with rapid turnaround time for researchers in academia, biotech and pharma. The company processes tissue specimens and digitizes the results, hosting client’s data on a proprietary platform, PathologyMap. This online platform contains the largest collection of preclinical pathology data crowdsourced from the scientific community and the first network of top pathologists for on-demand diagnosis, said the developer.
Dr Cheng told BioPharma-Reporter: “99% of histopathology is never used or shared. Traditional imaging is of a snapshot of a tissue and traditional storage is on a glass slide aging away in the drawers of pathologists or on the shelves of labs and hospitals. HistoWiz has revolutionized the usage of this tissue by scanning, digitizing, and storing images on our platform.