AstraZeneca and Boston-based Tremont AI will develop and evaluate AI solutions for preclinical toxicologic pathology, part of safety assessment conducted before medicines reach human trials, under a research collaboration. Tremont said the collaboration will evaluate models against the challenges of rare findings that can resemble background changes, aiming to reduce repetitive review and give specialists more time for interpretation. Luca Weishaupt, CEO and Co-founder of Tremont AI, said foundation models can change how preclinical safety data is read, making it faster to triage and more consistent to interpret. Research underlying the TRACE toxicology model illustrates the difficulty: some focal abnormalities can occupy less than 1% of a tissue section. Tremont emerged from stealth in September this year, four weeks before announcing the AstraZeneca collaboration; the company spun out of the Mahmood Lab and builds on technology exclusively licensed from Mass General Brigham. Tremont’s scientific co-founders are Faisal Mahmood, Long Phi Le, Guillaume Jaume and Jakob N. Kather. Tremont is developing models and AI agents for pharmaceutical companies and contract research organizations conducting preclinical safety studies, aiming to connect tissue findings with other evidence across a study. Researchers trained the TRACE model on 15 million image patches from digitized rat tissue sections and evaluated applications including lesion severity scoring and dose-response characterization.