Bioptimus to Expand AI-Based Tissue Atlas with French GI Cancer Network
The agreement gives France’s Bioptimus access to clinical trial data from more than 3,000 gastrointestinal cancer patients, including spatial omics data.
French artificial intelligence startup Bioptimus has signed a partnership with the Fédération Francophone de Cancérologie Digestive (FFCD), a French academic cancer research organization, granting the Paris-based biotech access to a cohort of clinical trial data from more than 3,000 gastrointestinal (GI) cancer patients.
Under the terms of the agreement, announced June 30, Bioptimus will sponsor the generation of new spatial transcriptomics data on the FFCD’s patient cohorts. That data will measure and map gene activity within tissue samples, enabling researchers to use AI on routine pathology slides to predict gene expression data directly from the image.
In exchange, the FFCD gains access to Bioptimus’s M-Optimus multimodal foundation model. The FFCD retains full ownership of all generated data, which it will share with Bioptimus, and will have access to all newly produced spatial omics data for use in its own research programs.
Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
The deal advances Bioptimus’s Spatial Tissue Embedding Learning Atlas (STELA), a multimodal tissue atlas linked to clinical data. The FFCD dataset is the largest GI cancer spatial omics atlas generated to date, the partners said in a statement.
“High-quality clinical data is the key to building a foundation AI model in biotechnology and this agreement will boost vital precision oncology research and patient health,” David Cahané, cofounder and managing director of Bioptimus, said in a statement. The FCCD data “anchors STELA’s GI cancer coverage in the kind of high-quality, outcome-linked clinical data that spatial atlases rarely include.”
Bioptimus seeks 100,000 samples to build STELA, with plans to integrate H&E imaging, spatial transcriptomics, and RNA-seq. Its M-Optimus model, announced in late 2025, was trained on a proprietary dataset including millions of patients and samples from more than 50 organs.
By using the model, “we aim to uncover novel features of tumor heterogeneity in GI cancers and gain deeper insights into the complex interactions between the tumor and its microenvironment” Pierre Laurent-Puig of the FFCD said in a statement. “Ultimately, these findings may help reveal hidden mechanisms driving treatment resistance and response, paving the way toward more precise and personalized therapeutic strategies for patients.”
Bioptimus has raised at least $76 million to date.