Siena, October 8 (askanews) – The GLIOGEN-X project was presented at the Monte dei Paschi di Siena Foundation, which aims to verify whether brain MRI images already contain the information needed to characterize the molecular profile of gliomas. Funded by the European Innovation Council with nearly €4 million, it will last four years and is one of only seven selected under the Pathfinder Challenges call for proposals dedicated to the use of generative artificial intelligence in the diagnosis and treatment of tumors. Siena Imaging is a small start-up founded in 2017 as a spin-off of the University of Siena.
It grew slowly, developing software for analyzing brain MRI images. This software met with success both academically and commercially: already during the long incubation period, when we were still working in the University laboratory directed by Professor De Stefano, various pharmaceutical companies requested our services. So, in 2017, we decided to take the plunge and became a small to medium-sized company incubated in Toscana Life Sciences,” said Marco Battaglini, CEO and co-founder of Siena Imaging. The molecular profile of a glioma, crucial for diagnosis and treatment decisions, can be determined through tumor tissue analysis.
An invasive procedure that, however, is not always feasible. "What we can guarantee to Siena Imaging's counterpart is a huge amount of data from clinical, treatment, radiology, and molecular profiling, which is centralized in the North in a single laboratory subjected to rigorous quality controls," added Federico Roncaroli, Professor of Clinical Neuropathology and principal investigator at the University of Manchester. "The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya will provide its expertise in federated learning to help manage the project's data most effectively, allowing UK hospitals to keep the data within the country while optimizing the computing capacity required for the new glioma detection algorithm," said Ferran Prados Carrasco, Principal Investigator of the Fundaciò per la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (FUOC). This project brings together research, medicine, and artificial intelligence and, for the Fondazione Toscana Life Sciences, also represents a demonstration of the Siena area's ability to compete at the European level.
"I want to emphasize the highly competitive nature of the call we submitted, which led to this significant result. Given that these are extremely selective European calls, our victory demonstrates, first and foremost, the ability of our researchers to position themselves at the forefront of research," concluded Francesco Frati, president of TLS. The challenge for the next four years will therefore be to understand whether an MRI can reveal much more than what we can see today: to the point of revealing, without the need for invasive surgery, the very biology of the tumor.
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