On April 6, 2021 Volastra Therapeutics reported it will collaborate with Microsoft to develop tools that help detect drivers of cancer metastasis (Press release, Volastra Therapeutics, APR 6, 2021, View Source [SID1234577634]). These unique digital pathology tools will accelerate the development of promising new therapies for cancer and help identify the patients most likely to benefit.

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"Metastasis is one of the biggest unsolved challenges in cancer treatment, but new insights into tumor biology from our founders have laid the groundwork for major advancements in this field," said Charles Hugh-Jones, M.D., Chief Executive Officer at Volastra. "We are excited to work with Microsoft to apply data science to the challenges of cancer research. The digital tools we develop will fuel our drug discovery efforts and bring new hope to people living with cancer."

"We have seen the tremendous promise of advanced computation in the fields of medical diagnostics and drug discovery," said Desney Tan, Ph.D., Managing Director, Microsoft Health Futures. "The collaboration with Volastra will lead to potential advances in the development of therapies to prevent and treat cancer metastasis. We look forward to continued collaboration with Volastra to deliver solutions for the computational life sciences community."

The teams will work together on algorithms to identify markers that correlate with tumor metastatic behaviors. The collaboration will develop automated machine learning tools capable of rapidly and accurately integrating insights across multiple datasets, including pathology slides and three-dimensional tumor-derived organoids.