Strand Scientific Intelligence, Inc. a division of Bengaluru-based Strand Life Sciences and Curie-Cancer a division of Institut Curie, announced the launch of the Curie Image Database (CID), a breakthrough image analysis and management platform that has been jointly developed over the last two years at the ‘Cell and Tissue Imaging’ Core Facility of the InstitutCurie (PICT-IBiSA).

Institut Curie is a private foundation formed by Marie Curie, the first woman Nobel prize winner. Now CID was created using Strand’s award-winning Avadis platform.

It now enables over 250 scientists at Institut Curie and ten other collaborating institutions across Europe to effectively manage heterogeneous imaging data and complex analysis workflows.

“Institut Curie’s expertise in advanced imaging platforms and Strand's ability to engineer superior scientific software have come together to create a scalable, secure and efficient 'open access' platform for microscopy images and analysis algorithms,” says Dr  Vijay Chandru, co-founder and CEO of Strand.

“We are excited by the launch of this platform at the world’s leading cancer research institute. Strand has built an advanced genome sequencing-based diagnostic platform for oncology. Going forward we would like to explore with Institut Curie an advanced decision support platform for oncologists that integrates genomic signatures of cancers and imaging data towards better diagnosis and treatment of cancer patients,” he added.

“Our goal was not only to provide an image ‘management’ system but also an interactive research tool that allows data and analysis sharing for distant and multidisciplinary projects between teams from different labs and institutes and that is able to handle the exponential growth and complexity of scientific and biomedical images generated by advanced microscopy systems,” stated Jean Salamero, scientific director, Cell and Tissue Imaging Core Facility at Curie-Cancer.

“Funding through the France Bio-Imaging program and Canceropole-IdF, a French network of institutions dedicated to oncology, allowed us to link CID to a new and secure storage infrastructure and to promote access to image processing on dedicated clusters. Going forward, we would like to integrate this image database with other types of data, like genomic data or clinical and anatomy-pathological data related to clinical projects, resulting in an even more effective weapon in our fight against cancer,” he said.

According to Damien Salauze, director of Curie-Cancer, such a partnership project may ultimately help with the treatment of cancer. We are delighted to have contributed to the implementation of this technology developed by an international SME like Strand, whose roots are in India. This partnership embodies the principles of the Institut Carnot label which we were awarded by the French government in 2011 in recognition of our drive to provide genuine solutions for industry and ultimately for patients.