Octo Consulting Partners with Indica Labs to Launch COVID-DPR; Mehul Sanghani, Susan Gregurick Quoted

Octo Consulting and Indica Labs have partnered to launch the online COVID Digital Pathology Repository, a virtual collection of high resolution microscopic COVID-related human tissue images hosted at the National Institutes of Health, Octo announced on Thursday.

“The entire Indica Labs team takes great pride in working with NIH and Octo to deliver a much-needed global integration for COVID-19 pathology and a framework for the implementation of further cutting-edge technologies,” said Steven Hashagen, CEO at Indica Labs. “Deployment of the HALO Link platform will provide data availability and allow real-time collaboration between the world’s leading clinical institutions.”

COVID-DPR will provide a centralized, cloud-based repository for sharing and annotating digital whole slide images of lung, liver, kidney and heart tissues from patients infected with COVID-19, as well as the closely related coronaviruses associated with SARs and MERs. 

The whole slide images, annotations, and metadata in the repository will be used as a reference dataset for education, research and future clinical trials aimed at limiting further infection, disease and death.COVID-DPR will be supported by Indica Labs’ HALO Link software platform that has been designed to secure sharing of digital whole slide images and data. 

The HALO Link will be deployed in a web portal developed and managed by Octo and Axle Informatics to provide a secure, globally accessible central repository, so Biomedical scientists can securely add, view, annotate, analyze, and share whole slide images. Indica Labs’ image analysis, machine learning, and artificial intelligence tools can also be integrated and accessed within the HALO Link interface.

“This resource provides all investigators a platform to access important reference datasets, and in the next iteration, to support clinical trials research and provide datasets for computational studies based on imaging analysis and artificial intelligence,” said Susan Gregurick, NIH Associate Director for Data Science and Director of the Office of Data Science Strategy.

COVID-DPR will be available immediately as a shared resource for researchers at institutes around the world with initial datasets being provided by infectious disease labs across North America, Europe, and Australia. 

“We knew we wanted to do something meaningful to help fight the COVID pandemic. This project with Indica Labs and NIH was exactly the avenue we were looking for,” Octo CEO Mehul Sanghani said. “This effort really allows us to put our best capabilities to use on this pivotal effort. We’re ecstatic to be part of this team.”

About Octo

Octo challenges the status quo, empowering federal agencies to leap IT hurdles by using emerging technologies to create transformative solutions that enable rapid modernization, enhance citizen engagement, and maximize human impact. We continually explore ways to transform IT, producing results vital to national security, intelligence, health care, and more.

Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, Octo is a technology firm dedicated to solving the Federal Government’s most complex challenges with Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Agile DevSecOps, Cloud Engineering, Open Source, Cybersecurity, and Data Analytics solutions. Octo enables the government to modernize faster and meet the needs of rapidly changing missions with agility. Our approach is collaborative, and our outcomes are superior.