Singapore’s A*STAR signed a memorandum of understanding with HistoIndex to use quantitative, AI-driven digital pathology for evaluating preclinical therapeutic candidates in fibrotic diseases. The collaboration focuses on building an end-to-end evaluation workflow for fibrosis programs, including cancer-associated fibrosis. HistoIndex’s technology is designed to reduce variability in histopathology assessment by extracting quantitative readouts from tissue images—turning subjective scoring into measurable metrics. A*STAR’s involvement brings academic research scale and fibrosis biology expertise into the screening/evaluation loop. The agreement matters for drug development timelines because fibrosis programs often face translation friction: robust biomarkers and consistent preclinical endpoints are hard to achieve. By standardizing evaluation through digital pathology, the partners aim to make preclinical decision-making more reproducible.