Spun out from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Paige.ai is developing artificial intelligence technology to improve the clinical diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

Paige.ai, a US-based oncology-focused artificial intelligence (AI) technology spinout from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), launched yesterday with $25m in series A funding co-led by Jim Breyer.

Breyer, co-founder and CEO of VC firm Breyer Capital, co-led the round with Julian Robertson, founder of investment firm Tiger Management, according to MedCity News, though other investors were not named.

MSK obtained an equity stake of undisclosed size in the spinout in return for providing Paige.ai with exclusive access to its library of 25 million pathology slides. The research institute did not supply any capital, according to TechCrunch.

Paige.ai aims to tackle the inefficiencies of clinical diagnosis in oncology, which currently relies on pathologists manually going through and interpreting as many as 60 slides of a biopsy, though in many cases only a handful turn out to be relevant.

The ability to digitise the slides has existed for decades but is hardly used as it does not improve workflow – simply moving the slides from under a microscope to a screen.

Paige.ai’s technology combines AI with clinician-generated annotations and incorporates anonymised clinical, treatment, genomic and survival data. The approach means pathologists can interpret data without the need to manually compile it first, speeding up work while reducing cost.

The technology is based on research by Thomas Fuchs, director of computational pathology in the Warren Alpert Center for Digital and Computational Pathology at MSK and a professor at Cornell University’s Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences.

Paige.ai will initially focus on breast, cancer and other major cancers. It hopes to partner with additional academic medical centres, commercial laboratories and pharmaceutical firms.

David Klimstra, co-founder of Paige.AI and chairman of the Department of Pathology at MSK, said: “Patients deserve and need an accurate diagnosis as quickly as possible, yet our current methods are time-consuming, expensive and subjective.

“The field is ripe for innovation and we are confident that Paige.AI will aid pathologists in detecting disease better and faster. With computational pathology, pathologists can redirect their efforts toward more sophisticated tasks, such as integrating histologic findings with other diagnostic analyses.”