Tempus AI has acquired the digital pathology developer Paige, including its FDA-cleared, artificial intelligence-powered programs for spotting the signs of cancer.
The deal totals $81.25 million, which includes Tempus paying out Paige’s remaining commitment to Microsoft Azure for its cloud-computing services. The transaction will also be “paid predominantly” in Tempus stock, according to the company.
Tempus set its eyes on the former Fierce Medtech Fierce 15 winner in part for its massive, anonymized dataset, which encompasses nearly 7 million digitized pathology slides and clinical data licensed from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Paige has also developed a foundation AI model trained on more than 2.3 million whole-slide images spanning hundreds of thousands of patient cases. Earlier this year, Tempus announced plans to build its own multimodal model focused on cancer research, through a $200 million collaboration with AstraZeneca and Pathos AI.
“As we embark upon building the largest foundation model that’s ever been built in oncology, the acquisition of Paige substantially accelerates our efforts,” Tempus founder and CEO Eric Lefkofsky said in a statement.
“Paige is a leader in digital pathology and has amassed one of the most comprehensive digital pathology datasets in the world through its relationship with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center,” Lefkofsky added. “We believe both the Paige team, with their deep generative AI experience, and the dataset they have built, will be catalytic across all of our AI efforts.”
Last month, Paige raised the curtain on its PRISM2 AI, designed to help large-language models better understand pathology images by linking the visual patterns found in tissue samples with the written descriptions used by clinicians.
Developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research, the program aims to support a wide range of applications in both clinical practice and R&D, including in drug development, diagnostic biomarkers and predicting patient outcomes.
“We’ve always believed that the future of cancer care and precision medicine lies in harnessing the full potential of AI to redefine what’s possible in digital pathology and transform how cancer is detected, understood, and treated,” said Paige’s CEO and CTO, Razik Yousfi. “By joining forces with Tempus, a company already making remarkable strides in oncology diagnostics, we can bring our innovations to a broader patient population and deliver even greater impact.”