AI Summary:
Bioptimus is creating open AI models to transform medical research and diagnosis, starting with pathology and aiming for full-scale biological simulation.
Bioptimus is one of Europe’s most promising AI startups. Based in Paris, it was founded by former DeepMind researchers with the goal of building a universal foundation model for biology.
Building on Real Medical Data
In 2024, Bioptimus released H‑optimus‑0, an open-source AI model trained on over 500,000 histopathology slides from 4,000 labs. This model helps detect cancer, predict gene expression and improve lab workflows.
Earlier this year, the company launched H‑optimus‑1, trained on more than one million medical slides from 800,000 patients. This second model offers stronger performance across a wide range of tasks and organs, including breast, lung and colorectal cancers. Benchmarks from researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of Leeds confirm its accuracy.
Open, Transparent and Ambitious
Bioptimus is developing these tools as open-source systems. This allows labs, startups and healthcare systems to adopt the models without worrying about restrictive licensing or data leakage. The company has already raised 76 million US$ to support future models that will combine multiple types of biological data, including genomics and clinical records.