NEW YORK – Biostate AI and Weill Cornell Medicine said Tuesday that they have entered into a strategic collaboration to develop personalized artificial intelligence (AI)-based assessments for acute myeloid leukemia (AML).
The collaborators intend to develop and validate a model using RNA sequencing and AI to stratify AML subtypes, make disease prognoses, and select therapies.
Under the agreement, Houston-based Biostate will use its proprietary barcode-integrated reverse transcription (BIRT) library prep technology for RNA-seq to analyze patient samples from Weill Cornell's biorepository of bone marrow and blood samples. BIRT enables scalable profiling of both coding and noncoding RNA using primers designed to prevent RNA self-folding that can inhibit reverse transcription.
The project will begin with a pilot study aimed at designing a prototype AML-specific AI model using 1,000 retrospective bone marrow and blood samples. This will be expanded to include up to 50,000 samples, including longitudinal samples from the same patients, upon achieving predetermined technical milestones.
Financial details of the partnership were not disclosed.
"Disease prognosis represents an important new direction for Biostate AI and unlocks applications never before possible with AI as a field," Ashwin Gopinath, cofounder and chief technology officer of Biostate AI, said in a statement. "Traditional RNA biomarker discovery has led to the development of standard-of-care tests like Oncotype Dx for breast cancer, but this approach has failed to generalize to other diseases or even to other cancers. By taking on a modern AI plus massive data approach, we believe that Biostate AI is developing a general-purpose technology possible for improving outcomes for patients suffering from all diseases."