On April 14, 2026 4D Path, a company dedicated to personalizing cancer care through a novel, physics-informed approach to predicting tumor response to therapy, reported a collaboration with Daiichi Sankyo (TSE: 4568) to develop next-generation predictive biomarkers in an antibody drug conjugate (ADC) clinical development program.
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ADCs are among the most promising therapeutic classes in oncology, yet there remains a significant unmet need for scalable biomarkers that predict which patients are most likely to benefit from increasingly complex regimens and combination therapies. This collaboration brings together 4D Path’s ability to compute biologically grounded, physics-informed treatment predictive biomarkers from routine pathology specimens with the ADC innovation leadership of Daiichi Sankyo.
Under the collaboration, 4D Path will apply its proprietary Q-Plasia OncoReader (QPOR) platform to standard Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E)-stained tumor biopsy slides to compute interpretable, quantitative biomarkers associated with cell-cycle deregulation and tumor microenvironment dynamics. These biomarkers will be evaluated for their ability to identify patients most likely to benefit from the select ADC, helping enable more precise, non-invasive, and cost-effective patient selection, potentially improving response rates and accelerating clinical trials.
This approach is designed to be compatible with both retrospective analyses of archived clinical specimens and prospective evaluation in ongoing and future studies.
"While the introduction of ADCs has improved outcomes for patients, more advanced biomarkers that are predictive of response to these agents is needed. 4D Path’s novel approach to utilizing biological and physical characteristics from routine H&E-stained biopsy slides to predict benefit from ADCs has the potential to improve outcomes, helping patients get the right therapy at the optimal time in their disease course," said Lee Schwartzberg, medical oncologist and Scientific Advisory Board member, 4D Path.
The collaboration is expected to also generate functional mechanistic insights into tumor-specific patterns of response and resistance—helping illuminate how biological context may interact with ADC designs. By transforming routine pathology images into actionable, physics-informed collective tumor state variables, the agreement aims to enrich translational understanding while supporting more personalized and effective treatment strategies.
"The deep precision medicine focus of this collaboration in digital pathology brings in 4D Path’s QPOR platform-derived pan-cancer insights identifying patients likely to respond to treatment, by one-shot computation of cell cycle and tumor microenvironment dynamics from routine tissue images. Additionally, this will potentially shed light on tumor specific biological understanding of response and resistance, enriching knowledge of the relative impact of targets, linkers, and payloads on outcomes and accelerating precision ADC treatments," said Satabhisa Mukhopadhyay, Ph.D., co-founder and chief scientific officer at 4D Path.
This collaboration underscores the industry-wide shift toward AI-driven, image-based biomarkers that can be deployed at scale using standard-of-care specimens—supporting faster, more confident treatment decisions and improving the probability of success in clinical development.
(Press release, Daiichi Sankyo, APR 14, 2026, https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260408304934/en/4D-Path-Announces-Collaboration-with-Daiichi-Sankyo-to-Advance-AI-Driven-Predictive-Biomarkers-for-an-Antibody-Drug-Conjugate-Program [SID1234664383])