Coventry & Birmingham, UK – 11 Feb 2026 – Histofy, a leading UK-based pathology AI company, is pleased to announce that it has signed a contract with the West Midlands Secure Data Environment (WMSDE) to support advanced annotation and AI-driven enrichment of whole-slide images.
As part of this agreement, Histofy will provide access to its proprietary Helix platform, which delivers rich annotation of digital pathology images at scale. This contribution will enhance over 500,000 whole-slide images already hosted within the SDE, making the dataset significantly more valuable for researchers, clinicians, and future AI developers working to improve outcomes in a variety of cancers.
Professor Simon Ball, SRO of WMSDE remarked:
“This exciting development builds on WMSDE’s established capabilities in managing whole-slide images and multimodal data. It will further enable data-driven research and innovation, optimising the value of existing resources such as the PATHLAKE dataset, alongside emerging real-world data from the West Midlands Digital Pathology Network and future novel datasets.”
Professor Nasir Rajpoot, CEO of Histofy commented:
“This marks a major step forward in making high-quality, structured pathology data widely accessible for research and innovation. We’re proud to partner with the WMSDE to enrich one of the country’s most important pathology image datasets and unlock its potential for the next generation of AI-powered discovery.”
Professor David Snead, Chief Medical Officer at Histofy added:
“This collaboration is a key milestone in the responsible adoption of AI in cellular pathology and builds on the foundations laid during the PathLAKE project. By embedding expert-validated histological features directly into the dataset, we’re not just scaling annotation, we’re setting a new standard for what high-quality digital pathology data should look like.”
Dr Simon Graham, Chief Technology Officer at Histofy, stated:
“At the heart of this project is a scalable platform purpose-built for high-throughput and clinically relevant annotation of digital pathology images. This project exemplifies how technology and domain expertise can converge to make real, usable data available for research & development of AI for patient benefits.”
The project builds on Histofy team’s leadership in AI for pathology, and its experience of working with NHS datasets through nationally recognised programmes such as PathLAKE funded by Innovate UK and the Office of Life Sciences (OLS). This partnership further strengthens the WMSDE’s mission to create secure, high-quality environments for data-driven research and innovation in healthcare.
This work has been funded through the NHSE Data for Research and Development programme.
The West Midlands Secure Data Environment (WMSDE) is a secure platform allowing approved researchers to analyse linked, anonymised NHS patient data within a controlled, safe setting, to deliver public benefit. It is one of 7 regional SDE’s in England. For further information on the West Midlands Secure Data Environment, please visit https://westmidlandssde.nhs.uk/
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