Pictor Labs announced the release of ClearStain, an AI-powered virtual staining technology, on Thursday. ClearStain enables pathologists to visualize and annotate the exact tissue being sequenced with no adjacent slides and no chemical stains, the company said. The technology could accelerate turnaround time from days to minutes, according to Pictor Labs.
Stained human lung tissue. Credit: Adobe
Pathologists compared tissues and tumors visualized with ClearStain to traditional chemically stained slides and found them visually comparable in 99 to 100% of regions reviewed, according to the press release.
ClearStain generates AI-powered virtual H&E images directly from unstained slides, enabling real-time visualization, annotation and quality control of the tissue. This improves tumor purity and lowers sequencing failure rates. Using unstained slides allows scientists to preserve tissue for additional downstream assays.
“With ClearStain, cases that would have failed sequencing in the past can be rescued,” said Megan Rothney, vice president of product at Pictor Labs. “Pathologists can now guide molecular testing on the same tissue, in real time, and give molecular data to patients who might not have received it before.”
ClearStain will join DeepStain and ReStain, Pictor Labs’s virtual staining solutions, which allow researchers to generate multiple stains from a single sample. DeepStain allows for virtual histological staining of label-free tissue, and ReStain enables virtual re-staining of H&E images.
Pictor’s virtual staining technology transforms tissue autofluorescence into stain-equivalent images using deep learning models trained on co-registered image pairs of unstained and chemically stained tissue.
ClearStain will debut at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) 2025 meeting on Nov. 5-9 in National Harbor, Md.
Researchers can now sign up for early access to Pictor Labs’s Virtual Stain Hub, an interactive platform to explore the company’s AI-generated virtual stains. The platform will provide researchers with real-time access to virtual staining results and side-by-side comparisons with traditional stains.
Pictor Labs’s virtual stain solutions are compatible with human and animal tissue and histology, cytology and hematology. Virtual staining has applications in spatial biology, toxicology, biomarker screening and drug discovery and development. For drug discovery, the molecular data gleaned from virtual staining provides information about cell health, disease states and how targets react to potential therapies.
Filed Under: AI Meets Life Sci
