Two medical professionals consulting at a computer screen as a patient goes into a CAT scan
Scientists in a computational imaging lab at Case Western Reserve University are hoping that a novel computerized approach that looks for cancer signals outside the tumor area itself will be a historic leap in diagnosing cancer using just routine CAT scans.

Case Western Reserve University teams with Boehringer Ingelheim on artificial intelligence solutions for precision medicine

The Center for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics (CCIPD) at Case Western Reserve University recently signed a three-year research agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.

The agreement was the third partnership in 2020 between the CCIPD and leading biopharmaceutical companies to advance artificial intelligence (AI) tools for disease diagnosis and prognosis, as well as predicting responses to therapy.

In April 2020, the CCIPD entered into a contract with AstraZeneca and earlier in the year had inked a similar deal with Bristol-Myers Squibb Company.

Under the new research agreement, computational biologists at Boehringer Ingelheim will collaborate with researchers at CCIPD to develop AI technologies that span different modes and scales of data, including radiographic, digital pathology and molecular-length scale data.

Anant Madabhushi, professor
Anant Madabhushi

“The partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim and other pharmaceutical companies validates that the work we are doing isn’t simply cutting-edge research in the area of computational imaging, but is truly relevant to pharmaceutical applications,” said Anant Madabhushi, principal investigator of the project, director of CCIPD and the Donnell Institute Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve.

CCIPD and Boehringer Ingelheim will leverage the power of CCIPD’s image computing AI solutions to identify patterns and links between cellular response and underlying molecular drivers, with the goal of advancing therapeutics for diseases with no satisfactory treatment option.

CCIPD is located near four medical centers—Cleveland Clinic, MetroHealth, the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center and University Hospitals—creating a unique biomedical ecosystem that allows for close collaboration among postdoctoral researchers, radiologists, pathologists, medical and surgical professionals.   

In addition, the relationship between CCIPD and Boehringer Ingelheim will help accelerate the training of future scientific leaders by leveraging a medical research ecosystem and intellectually inspiring environment to empower some of those postdocs to bring AI solutions to industry.


For more information, contact Mike Scott at mike.scott@case.edu.