Eric Lefkofsky

Money Moves

Roche's most direct competitor in AI-driven oncology diagnostics

For a century, the cancer diagnosis that decides a patient's treatment has come from a pathologist staring at a tumor slide through a microscope. Software is now doing that reading—and the pharmaceutical companies that sell the drugs are buying the companies that built the software. On May 7, Roche agreed to pay up to $1.05 billion for PathAI, the largest independent AI pathology firm in the United States.

Updated May 31

New Capabilities

Leading expansion of AI precision medicine platform

For decades, cancer drug trials have failed at a rate exceeding 95%, burning through $50–60 billion annually on treatments tested in patients unlikely to respond. On April 17, 2025, researchers from AstraZeneca and Tempus AI published in Cancer Cell results from the Predictive Biomarker Modeling Framework, a machine learning system using contrastive learning on existing clinical data. The system can identify which cancer patients will survive longer on immunotherapy versus chemotherapy. Applied retrospectively to completed phase 3 trials, it improved survival outcomes by 15% compared to traditional patient selection.

Updated May 27