As 2024 draws to a close, we at Indica Labs would like to thank the customers and collaborators who helped fill 2024 with exciting discoveries, events, and partnerships. It is a great honor to have played a part in customers’ contributions to scientific fields ranging from immuno-oncology to infectious disease, immunology, neuroscience, and metabolism. You can learn more about the exciting findings published by our customers this year by reviewing our Literature Page. As a testament to their creativity and dedication, in 2024 there were over 150 publications citing HALO® in peer-reviewed high-impact journals, with an average impact factor of 19.5.

In our 13^th year, Indica Labs continued to expand, adding new team members from around the world to groups across the company, and there are now more than 110 members of the Indica Labs team. This year, Indica Labs was again recognized as a Top Workplace by the Albuquerque Journal. As our CEO, Steven Hashagen observed, “it has been our experience from the company’s start that the most creative, skillful, industry changing work happens when each employee is valued and supported, and we’re honored to have our culture recognized for the fifth straight year.”

PRODUCT UPDATES

This year saw major developments across our HALO platforms for clinical and life science applications. We were thrilled to introduce our HALO AP Dx enterprise pathology platform and announce that the platform had received FDA clearance for primary diagnosis. This 510(k) clearance allows HALO AP Dx to be utilized in conjunction with the Hamamatsu NanoZoomer® S360MD Slide scanner for in-vitro diagnostic use. To learn more about HALO AP Dx and see the platform in action, you can watch our reveal webinar. The development team was also hard at work on HALO AP®, our CE-IVDR marked, AI-powered enterprise digital pathology platform, and the release of HALO AP® 2.3 brought powerful new capabilities, from Z-stack viewing to macrodissection workflow support.

We were delighted to also release a transformative new version of our HALO platforms for life science in 2024. The 4.0 versions of HALO, HALO AI, and HALO Link offer researchers and pathologists unparalleled ease of use and performance, with even more opportunities to leverage advanced AI-powered image analysis in an open digital pathology ecosystem. View the sneak peek webinars for HALO, HALO AI, and HALO Link to learn more about the new features.

We released several exciting AI tools for life science and clinical applications in 2024. Our new HALO AI Apps are pre-trained tissue classifiers and cell phenotypers for tissue-based research applications that offer powerful image analysis capabilities across a variety of tissue types out-of-the-box, and also have the capacity for further training. This year we also launched Lung Macrodissect AI, an innovative tool that uses AI to quantify tumor content and generate tumor-density heat maps, guiding ROI selection for downstream macrodissection. Lastly, the new 3.0 version of our SlideQC BF image quality control network was released, offering powerful artifact detection and segmentation for both H&E and IHC images. You can learn about these tools in our HALO AI Apps reveal webinar, Lung Macrodissect AI sneak peek, and slide quality control webinar.

EVENTS

This year was another busy year for events, with Indica software and services showcased at events around the world. We were delighted to welcome hundreds of attendees across our 2024 user group meetings in Frankfurt, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, Tokyo, Beijing, and London, where our guest presenters shared about their exciting HALO applications in academia, industry, and medicine. The Indica team also attended over 20 conferences across North America, Europe, and Asia, where we had the pleasure of speaking with new and familiar acquaintances and sharing posters and presentations about the latest HALO developments.

In addition to in-person meetings, we hosted 15 webinars this year, including masterclasses, product showcases, and HALO user presentations on applications of HALO AI in celiac disease research and on investigating thymocyte development using HALO and the ACD RNAscope™ HiPlex assay. If you missed any of these events, visit the webinars section on our News and Events page to watch the recordings.

PARTNERSHIP NEWS

At Indica Labs, 2024 was another exciting year for partnerships. We announced our partnership with Paige to integrate Paige’s Diagnostic AI models into HALO AP®, enabling users to execute these AI applications and view results directly within the platform. We also announced our collaboration with Histofy focused on bringing the company’s cutting-edge AI tools into clinical practice via integration with HALO AP®. Steven Hashagen noted that these partnerships “[represent] a significant step forward in our commitment to delivering innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers,” and will allow for best-of-breed AI-enabled workflows designed to improve laboratory efficiency, diagnostic quality, and patient outcomes.

Marking a major milestone for HALO cloud deployment and our Cloud Services, in 2024 we joined the Amazon Web Services Partner Network (APN), a global community of AWS Partners that leverage programs, expertise, and resources to build, market, and co-sell customer offerings. With the successful completion of the foundational technical review of HALO, HALO AI, HALO Link, and HALO AP®, these platforms are now AWS Qualified Software. As Eric Runde, our Chief Operating Officer, stated, “AWS has long been recognized as the leading cloud services provider and it is an honor to meet their rigid standards and bring their technical advantages to customers of Indica Labs.”

This year we were proud to partner with Molecular Instruments to comarket compatibility between MI’s patented HCR™ Imaging technology for RNA-ISH and our HALO software, a powerful combination that we demonstrated in a joint webinar. Lastly, we were delighted to continue our numerous existing partnerships, which produced exciting results such as the FDA clearance for HALO AP Dx for use with Hamamatsu images acquired with the company’s NanoZoomer® S360MD slide scanner.

CLINICAL DEPLOYMENTS

We are delighted to have partnered with several leading institutions in 2024 to implement digital primary diagnostics using our HALO AP® platform. Supported by the pathologist-centered features and seamless AI integration offered by HALO AP®, these deployments aim to benefit patients and pathologists by both streamlining today’s diagnostic workflows and laying the foundation for a future with AI-enabled pathology. You can learn more about these deployments by reading our announcements with the Medical University of Graz, the Institute of Molecular Pathology and Immunology of the University of Porto, and the Institute of Tissue Medicine and Pathology at the University of Bern.

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

In 2024, we released many new resources for both the basic research and clinical communities, including a Multiplex IHC white paper, a SlideQC BF application note, and a case study on the BRaIN laboratory’s experience partnering with our Cloud Services team. To view these resources and others, including webinars, tutorial videos, and release notes, sign up for our Learning Portal. We also added numerous posts to our blog this year, delving into topics ranging from AI integration in HALO AP® to the new Compliance Add-on for HALO Link, classifier pipelines in HALO AI, and the tumor board functionality of HALO AP® and HALO AP Dx. Check out the “Blogs” tab on our News & Events page to find these and other entries. Also, you can subscribe to our newsletter, using the form at the bottom of our homepage, if you would like news of the latest Indica Labs releases, events, and customer support materials to come to you.

LOOKING FORWARD TO 2025

At Indica Labs, we’re excited for the developments, partnerships, and customer successes that 2025 will bring. The coming year will be another busy one for our development teams, and we look forward to sharing the latest advances across our suite of HALO offerings. We know that our Pharma Services team is ready to put these new tools to use in 2025, so reach out if you would like to learn more about how your project could benefit from their expertise and resources.

We offer our deepest thanks to all those who supported Indica Labs this year, and we look forward to working with you to meet your digital pathology goals in 2025!

HALO AP Dx (K232833) is FDA-cleared for primary diagnostic use with the Hamamatsu NanoZoomer® S360MD Slide scanner in the US. In addition, HALO AP Dx provides built-in compliance and certifications with FDA 21 CFR Part 11 and HIPAA. 

HALO AP® is CE-IVDR marked for in-vitro diagnostic use in Europe, the UK, and Switzerland. HALO AP® is For Research Use Only in the US and is not FDA cleared for clinical diagnostic use. In addition, HALO AP® provides built-in compliance and certifications with FDA 21 CFR Part 11, HIPAA, and GDPR.

Lung Macrodissect AI is not a medical device in the EU/UK and is not intended to be used for diagnostic purposes. Lung Macrodissect AI is accessed via the HALO AP® enterprise digital pathology platform. Lung Macrodissect AI is For Research Use Only in the USA and is not FDA cleared for clinical diagnostic use.​

SlideQC BF is a quality control tool for whole slide images and is not regulated as a medical device under Regulation EU 2017/746 (IVDR) or MDR 2002 (UK).