Looking Back: Reviewing 2022 at Indica Labs
Indica Labs takes a look back over 2022.
Reflecting over the last year, we at Indica Labs would like to express our gratitude to the customers and collaborators who helped fill 2022 with exciting discoveries, events, and partnerships. It is our honor to have played a part in customers’ contributions to scientific fields ranging from oncology to infectious disease, immunology, neurology, and biomaterials. You can learn more about the over 300 peer-reviewed publications authored by our customers this year, with an average impact factor of 8.8, by reviewing our Literature Page.
In our 11th year, Indica Labs welcomed new employees from around the world to groups across the company, and there are now more than 100 members of the Indica Labs team. We believe that our colleagues are our most precious resource, and so Indica Labs is proud to have been named a top workplace by the Albuquerque Journal for the third year in a row. Though COVID-19 continues to pose challenges, Steven Hashagen, CEO at Indica Labs, noted that “we are finding new ways to attract and retain a quality workforce while maintaining our exemplary service for our customers. I’m proud of our employees and their ability to be flexible during this time and am honored and humbled for the company to receive this recognition for the third straight year.” Indica Labs is also pleased to have been recognized this year with a top honor in the Journal’s ‘Flying 40’ list of leading tech firms in New Mexico, based on growth.
EVENTS
We are glad that in 2022 Indica Labs was again able to host an in-person user group meeting, as well as return to numerous in-person conferences as COVID-19 disruptions lessened. Our user group meeting took place in London and was focused on how AI is empowering digital pathology applications across academia, industry, and the clinic. Presentation topics ranged from the development of AI tools for the diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer to using HALO to allow comparison between IHC and mass spectrometry results in clinical trials samples. We also enjoyed interacting with our customers and the community while attending 26 conferences across the USA, EU, UK, and Japan this year!
In addition to in-person meetings, we hosted ten webinars presented by customers. Topics ranged from the analysis of human brain tissue samples in Alzheimer’s disease to the integration of imaging mass cytometry and mass spectrometry imaging with other imaging approaches. Our 2022 webinar calendar also included four masterclasses, six product showcases, and an RNAscope webinar focused on overcoming common challenges in RNAscope. If you missed any of these events, visit the webinars section on our News and Events page to watch the recordings.
PARTNERSHIP NEWS
For us at Indica Labs, 2022 was a year of exciting new partnerships. We announced an agreement with Hamamatsu Photonics K.K. to maintain long-term interoperability between the Hamamatsu NanoZoomer family of scanners and the HALO AP® platform. We were glad to also partner with Leica Biosystems to maintain ongoing file format compatibility between Leica Biosystems’ Aperio GT 450 family of scanners and the HALO® family of software solutions. Interoperability is a major focus at Indica Labs, and as Gustavo Perez, President of Leica Biosystems, observed, “this new partnership can eliminate integration challenges and provides our customers with peace of mind when implementing a digital pathology workflow with Indica’s HALO product portfolio.”
In addition, this year we were proud to join with Lunaphore to co-market an end-to-end solution combining the Lunaphore COMET™ platform and our HALO and HALO AI software, providing a streamlined workflow for highly multiplex fluorescence image acquisition and analysis. You can learn more about this workflow in our collaborative eBook detailing TME highplex image analysis. We were also fortunate to continue our comarketing partnership with ACD, a Biotechne company, that led to a collaborative AACR poster and an application note describing HiPlex RNAscope™ image analysis using HALO.
In 2022, we were glad to announce two new partnerships focused on the clinic. We partnered with the Industrial Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research in Digital Diagnostics (iCAIRD) to develop an AI-based digital pathology solution for detecting cancer within lymph nodes from colorectal surgery cases. Lastly, Deep Bio and Indica Labs announced the integration of the Deep Bio DeepDx® Prostate algorithm into HALO AP. Steven Hashagen, CEO at Indica Labs, noted that “as digital pathology continues to enable AI-based workflows, we’ve recognized that to increase efficiency, case management systems like HALO AP® must support full integration of algorithms without sacrificing usability. The integration between DeepDx® and HALO AP® demonstrates how any algorithm vendor can leverage HALO AP® to deliver clinically relevant results directly within the pathologists’ viewing software, eliminating the need for an AI-specific viewer.” Read the case study to learn more about this integration!
PRODUCT UPDATES
The software development teams at Indica Labs remained busy throughout 2022, and we launched both the 3.4 and 3.5 versions of HALO, HALO AI, and HALO Link this year. If you haven’t updated to the latest version, check out the HALO and HALO AI 3.5 sneak peek and HALO Link 3.5 sneak peek webinars for a demonstration of the new features! Also, this year we were pleased to release new versions of the Object Colocalization and Vacuole Quantification modules.
Developments this year within our clinical portfolio included the release of version 2.0 of HALO AP, our anatomic pathology case management software. We are also excited that HALO AP received CE-IVD certification in 2022 for use in primary diagnosis in the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the UK. Our HALO Prostate AI tool, which is deployed through HALO AP and aids in identifying and grading prostate cancer, also achieved CE-IVD certification this year. We are delighted that these resources can begin to assist pathologists in clinical settings across Europe and the UK, and we look forward to more of our products attaining certification.
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
In 2022, we released many new resources for both the basic research and clinical communities, including a HALO AI white paper, a RNAscope application note, and a pamphlet describing the validation studies of HALO Prostate AI. To view these resources and others, including webinars, tutorial videos, release notes, and administration guides, sign up for our Learning Portal. Also, you can subscribe to our newsletter, using the form at the top of our homepage, if you would like news of the latest Indica Labs releases, events, and customer support materials to come to you.
LOOKING FORWARD TO 2023
At Indica Labs, we’re excited for the new developments and relationships that 2023 will bring. We are looking forward to major releases for our life science and clinical products as well as the launch of new clinical tools. We know that our Pharma Services team is ready to put these new tools to use in 2023, so don’t hesitate to reach out if you would like to learn more about how your project could benefit from Pharma Services’ expertise and resources.
Also in 2023, we are looking forward to the return of in-person user group meetings in the US, with the first planned for May 4th in Boston, and are working to organize additional 2023 meetings. To stay up to date on events and product news don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter, visit our News and Events page, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
To all those who supported Indica Labs this year we offer our deepest thanks, and we look forward to working with you to meet your image analysis goals in 2023!
