Lunit said on the 18th that it has entered a strategic partnership with Labcorp, the No. 1 global diagnostics and clinical trial services corporations, to cooperate in artificial intelligence (AI)-based digital pathology.
Labcorp is a corporations headquartered in North Carolina in the United States with a market capitalization of about 3.2 billion won (about 22.1 billion won), and more than 70,000 employees in over 100 countries perform more than 700 million diagnostic tests each year. It also provides clinical trial and analytics services in the development of numerous U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved new drugs.
The two companies formalized their cooperation by unveiling their first joint research results at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2025) and the Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP 2025) in the United States.
In their first study, the companies analyzed how the tumor microenvironment differs among non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients who have MET gene alterations that can cause cancer because proteins are not properly degraded, and they presented the results in succession at two major global conferences.
The researchers analyzed pathology slides from 371 patients by using Lunit's AI-based immune phenotype analysis solution Lunit Scope IO to divide them into three groups: "MET exon 14 deletion," "MET amplification," and "no MET mutation." As a result, they confirmed that the tumor microenvironment changes markedly depending on the mutation type and that the potential response to immunotherapy also appears differently.
Through this study, Lunit and Labcorp confirmed that AI digital pathology technology can make practical contributions to immunotherapy research, and they plan to gradually expand the scope of cooperation to large-scale studies using real-world prescription data and to other cancer types.
Seo Beom-seok, chief executive of Lunit, said, "The fact that global leader Labcorp has recognized Lunit's technological prowess is an important signal that AI technology can be used in real clinical settings," and added, "The combination of AI and digital pathology will become a key driver that naturally connects research insights to actual treatment decision-making."
Shakti Ramkissoon, Labcorp's chief medical officer, said, "We look forward to deriving clinically meaningful value from vast pathology data," and evaluated it as "a study that showed AI digital pathology can help accurately identify tumor characteristics and establish personalized treatment strategies."
Based on the positive results, the two companies plan to expand the partnership into various collaboration models with global pharmaceutical companies, including support for immunotherapy development, biomarker discovery, and companion diagnostics.