IImagene, a pioneering AI-powered precision oncology company backed by leading investors such as Larry Ellison, has won the Innovation Award in Precision Oncology category in the 2025 Pharmaceutical Technology Excellence Awards for its Oncology Intelligence (OI) Suite, a transformative solution that leverages AI and Real-World Data to enhance clinical trial efficiency and accelerate drug development—from biomarker discovery to clinical development and patient stratification.
Powered by GlobalData’s business intelligence, the Pharmaceutical Technology Excellence Awards recognize the most significant achievements and innovations in the pharmaceuticals industry, honoring the people and companies leading change and shaping the future of the sector.
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Imagene was recognized for its innovative approach to AI-driven biomarker discovery and hypothesis generation, enabling transnational and clinical development teams to work effectively with limited data. Additionally, Imagene’s OI Suite demonstrates operational benefits that can lead to improved productivity and cost savings, paving the way for more therapies to reach the market faster, and ultimately to cancer patients worldwide.
Powering clinical trials with AI-driven solutions for precision medicine
The OI Suite platform stands out for its ability to address critical challenges in precision medicine, particularly in the context of clinical trials and drug development. Traditional oncology drug development is plagued by long timelines, high costs, and low success rates. On average, it takes around 12 years and over $2.5 billion to bring a new oncology drug to market, with clinical trials accounting for a substantial portion of these expenses. Furthermore, approximately 90% of clinical trials fail, highlighting the significant challenges in bringing new therapies to the clinic.
More than 50% of oncology trials include biomarker-defined target subpopulations, making recruitment and trial execution more challenging. Imagene’s OI Suite can significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of clinical trials by enabling unlimited hypothesis generation even from limited datasets for advanced biomarker strategy. The suite allows researchers to simulate various scenarios, optimizing patient stratification and cohort selection based on advanced AI and real-world data. This capability not only accelerates the trial process but also enhances the likelihood of success by ensuring that the right patients are matched with the right therapies.
By leveraging artificial intelligence, the OI Suite allows researchers to generate new biomarker hypotheses independently, even when working with minimal data. This capability is crucial because only 6% of U.S. cancer patients participate in clinical trials, with an even lower 4% rate at non-NCI (National Cancer Institute) centers. OI Suite empowers pharmaceutical companies to navigate these challenges effectively, reducing time-to-market and enhancing overall productivity. For instance, by utilizing AI and Real-World Data to analyze existing datasets, researchers can identify potential biomarkers that may have been overlooked, thereby expanding the scope of clinical investigations.
AI-driven drug discovery: Enhancing research capabilities with limited data
At the cornerstone of the OI Suite is CanvOI, a state-of-the-art Oncology Intelligence foundation model designed to maximize the value of clinical datasets, applying advanced techniques across modalities – including vision, RNA expression, and textual data such as clinical history and pathology reports. CanvOI achieves up to 20% better accuracy than other leading pathology models when only limited data is available. This makes it an invaluable tool for pharmaceutical companies facing the complexities of real-world clinical scenarios and is particularly important given that many oncology trials now involve biomarker-defined target subpopulations, complicating patient recruitment and trial execution.
CanvOI trained on nearly 1.5M tissue samples from over 40 body organs and tissue types enables OI Suite to provide pharmaceutical companies with an independent capability to explore and make unlimited hypotheses leveraging their small clinical trials datasets. Moreover, OI Suite provides a versatile solution that is accessible to all levels of machine learning proficiency. Whether used as a cloud-based service or deployed on-premises, the OI Suite democratizes access to advanced AI tools, giving the power of AI to pharmaceutical translational research and clinical development teams. Currently, these teams often depend on third-party developers for each project focused on a single hypothesis. The OI Suite provides them with the flexibility to innovate, explore, and enrich their data with AI and Real-World Data.
Driving operational efficiency and cost savings in AI-driven drug development
Imagene’s OI Suite has demonstrated significant operational benefits, achieving up to 85% improvements in productivity, cost savings, and time-to-results. This level of efficiency is critical for pharmaceutical companies striving to optimize their research and development processes. By unlocking data and model capabilities, the OI Suite enables users to train, interpret, validate, and enhance model predictions without relying heavily on large labeled datasets.
The ability to simulate unlimited scenarios for testing and optimizing biomarker hypotheses further enhances research efficiency. Researchers can receive meaningful predictive biomarker insights from Real-World-Data, allowing them to refine their hypotheses before committing to costly clinical trials. This innovative approach accelerates AI-driven drug discovery and maximizes the potential for successful drug development.
The OI Suite’s integration with external real-world data sources enhances its predictive capabilities. By incorporating diverse datasets into their analyses, researchers can gain a more comprehensive understanding of disease mechanisms and treatment responses across different populations. This holistic view not only improves the accuracy of predictions but also supports more informed decision-making throughout the drug development process.
Transforming patient outcomes: The Imagene Lung Panel (LungOI) for biomarker profiling
The first application that was developed using CanvOI is Imagene Lung Panel, LungOI.
LungOI is the first AI-based multi-gene panel for predicting key non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) biomarkers directly from biopsy images within minutes, allowing for faster and more informed treatment decisions. In real-world scenarios, such as urgent cases requiring immediate treatment decisions, the Imagene Lung Panel can be very effective by delivering same-day results instead of weeks-long waiting times.
Recently, Imagene and Tempus AI announced a partnership to offer rapid lung cancer biomarker profiling test across the US bringing Imagene’s lung models into real-world clinical workflows and help accelerate and scale precision oncology efforts.
This can enhance patient outcomes and address critical challenges related to inadequate tissue samples that can lead to a 20% failure rate in traditional testing methods as well as long turnaround times and accessibility issues. For example, in a case report published on The Journal of Clinical Pathology involving a patient with advanced lung cancer and brain metastasis, the Imagene Lung Panel facilitated rapid identification of a specific mutation that allowed for rapid confirmation with PCR and timely initiation of targeted therapy, significantly improving the patient’s prognosis.
“We are honored to receive this recognition from the Pharmaceutical Technology Excellence Awards. This award is a testament to the value our Oncology Intelligence Suite brings to the pharmaceutical domain—especially in addressing the challenges of biomarker discovery and small, complex clinical trial cohorts. It reflects the dedication of our team and the trust placed in us by our partners. We remain committed to advance precision oncology and support pharmaceutical companies in their efforts to develop more targeted therapies and bring them faster to patients who need them most.“
– Dean Bitan, CEO & Co-founder, Imagene
Company Profile
Imagene is a pioneering company in AI-powered precision oncology, utilizing AI to capture complex features and patterns within biopsy images and omics data modalities, transforming clinical research and diagnostics. Imagene empowers life sciences, pharmaceutical companies, and clinical institutions to accelerate biomarker discovery, optimize clinical trials, and deliver faster, more precise cancer diagnostics.
Founded in 2020 and headquartered in the United States, Imagene is backed by leading investors, including Larry Ellison.
Links:
Website: https://imagene-ai.com
