US-based Virginia Commonwealth University's Stravitz-Sanyal Institute for Liver Disease and Metabolic Health has announced a partnership with Singapore-headquartered medtech company, Histoindex.

To initiate this joint effort, HistoIndex has commissioned one of its Genesis200 Second Harmonic Generation/Two-Photon Excitation (SHG/TPE) imaging systems at VCU's Molecular Medicine Research Building. HistoIndex's imaging system and its Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence (ML/AI) is the world's first automated, fully quantitative, stain-free, multi-organ digital pathology platform. It is widely used in preclinical studies as well as clinical trials, especially in drug development to treat nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).

This partnership will work together with the United States Food and Drug Administration (US FDA) for the in-vitro diagnostic approval of the Genesis SHG/TPE digital pathology platform as an assistive tool for the staging of fibrosis in NASH. The liver institute will serve as an international centre for SHG/TPE life science research, imaging unstained tissues from multiple collaborators across the world, and applying the latest ML/AI-based technology on these images.