Valar Labs

Advances in precision cancer care mean that it’s possible to offer specialized drugs to patients with specific genetic markers. Breast cancer patients who are positive for the HER‑2 gene, for example, are almost always treated with the antibody drug Herceptin. But 90 percent of cancer patients lack one of these actionable mutations. Might it be possible to predict the course of a cancer based on tissue samples alone? That’s the question Valar Labs is answering. The company’s ​“compu­ta­tional histology” platform can scan tissue slides from cancer patients and predict with high accuracy whether a tumor will become invasive and which treatments are likely to work. Valar has already unveiled a commercial test for bladder cancer, and is working to extend its platform to other cancers.