Optics, Machine Vision Algorithms at Heart of Epic-USC Collaboration

Epic Sciences Inc., a diagnostics and disease profiling company, announced it has entered into an exclusive license and collaboration agreement with the University of Southern California (USC) Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience, and the center’s Dr. Peter Kuhn, who leads USC’s Convergent Science Institute in Cancer (CSI-Cancer). The collaboration enhances the ability to provide precision characterizations of rare circulating tumor cells (CTCs). Epic is currently developing CTCs into liquid biopsy diagnostics for characterizing cancers to better guide treatment decisions.

Epic’s platform uses precision optics paired with AI-trained machine vision algorithms to analyze fluorescent antibodies-treated blood. System sensitivity is sufficient to detect a single rare cell in 10 million nucleated cells.

Through the newly formed agreement, USC Michelson will provide Epic access to comprehensive liquid biopsy from Kuhn’s laboratory. That access will help expand the company’s platform to provide in-depth characterization of both the cell-free fractions and CTCs in the liquid biopsy, using genomic, proteomic, and AI-based morphological tools acquired from a single blood draw.