Aiforia has received a contract award to provide artificial intelligence solutions for 25 NHS Trusts’ pathology departments in the UK to support the diagnosis of patients.
The Trusts are now able to purchase directly from Aiforia and to sign individual contracts without tender processes. The technology of the awarded vendor has already been qualified for clinical use, and the contract terms have been set. PathLAKE drives AI innovation in pathology for the UK intending to leverage the full value of NHS pathology data to drive economic growth in health-related AI. This was the first Call for Competition of its kind within the PathLAKE Plus consortium.
In the call for competition related to lung cancer diagnostics solutions, Aiforia was the only supplier who won the contract award for its CE-IVD marked AI model for Lung Cancer, PD-L1. In the prostate cancer-related call, Aiforia received the contract award as one of the three selected suppliers for its CE-IVD marked AI model for Prostate Gleason Grade Groups.
The duration of the individual contracts with the hospitals will be three years, with a possible three-year extension. The estimated volumes mentioned in the tender were 12,888 cases annually (109,166 slides) for prostate, and 2,522 cases (28,880 slides) annually for lung cancer PD-L1, with these numbers expected to increase annually.
“This contract award is strategically crucial for our operations in the UK – we now have a direct business opportunity with 25 NHS hospitals. The award offers a fast track for these hospitals to start using AI in their pathology departments, and they have all displayed their interest in doing so as they joined the PathLAKE Plus consortium. We are excited to support these hospitals in streamlining their pathology lab workflows and improving their diagnosis with our AI-assisted tools to ensure the best possible patient outcomes,” says Jukka Tapaninen, CEO of Aiforia.
On this occasion, Aiforia collaborated with a local company in the UK, Uralensis Innov8 Ltd, to match the tender requirements.
The PathLAKE consortium comprises some of the nation’s leading digital and computational innovators from NHS and academia. Through the digitisation of five major NHS laboratories and the formation of a computational pathology hub, it will drive AI innovation in pathology for the UK and create the world’s largest depository of annotated digital whole-slide images. PathLAKE will ensure that the UK is in prime position to leverage the full value of NHS pathology data to drive economic growth in health-related AI.