Precision at Scale, Built by Pathology Scientists
Founded in San Diego's biotech corridor, Synthia exists to remove the bottleneck of manual IHC annotation from cancer diagnostic workflows.
COMPANY PROFILE
Founding Story
A Problem Dr. Lin Saw First-Hand
Dr. Mei Lin completed her computational pathology research at a cancer research institute in San Diego's Torrey Pines biotech corridor. In reviewing hundreds of HER2 IHC cases, she noticed something that kept bothering her: the same slide, read by two different qualified pathologists, would occasionally land on different sides of the 2+/3+ threshold — a difference that directly affected whether a patient was eligible for trastuzumab therapy.
The problem wasn't pathologist incompetence. It was the fundamental subjectivity of visual estimation — how many cells constitute "more than 10%"? Which membrane staining pattern crosses from "incomplete" to "complete circumferential"? These are continuous biological phenomena being forced into discrete categories by a human visual system under time pressure.
Dr. Lin co-founded Synthia in 2021 with Dr. Alex Rowan, a computational imaging engineer, to build a narrow, scientifically rigorous tool that addressed exactly this problem. Not a broad AI pathology platform. Not a research annotation tool. One specific task: score IHC slides for HER2, PD-L1, and Ki-67 with the consistency and speed that manual annotation can't provide.
Synthia is based in San Diego's 92121 biotech corridor — close to the cancer research institutes, academic medical centers, and biotechnology partners that define the world Synthia is built for. Angel-backed since early 2026, the company is focused on validation rigor and regulatory-grade documentation before expanding its clinical partnerships.
San Diego 92121 biotech corridor — Synthia's home.
Mission
"We believe that reproducible biomarker quantification is a prerequisite for personalized oncology. Synthia does one thing: scores IHC slides with pathologist-grade accuracy, automatically. We automate the tedium — not the judgment."
Science First
Validation data and publications are public. No claims we can't back up with numbers and methodology.
Pathologist-Centered
AI augments the pathologist. The clinician always has the last word. Synthia never positions itself as a replacement for expert judgment.
Narrowly Focused
Three biomarkers. One workflow. Deep specialization produces more defensible accuracy claims than broad, unfocused platform products.
Join a Pilot Study
We are looking for academic oncology labs interested in evaluating Synthia for IHC workflow efficiency and concordance studies.