VirTues: A Foundation Model for Spatial Proteomics Published in Nature

DeryaTR_ · x · 2026-08-09

A new virtual tissue foundation model, VirTues, has been published in Nature. It is a general-purpose foundation model for spatial proteomics that learns multi-scale representations directly from multiplex imaging data.

From a single pretrained backbone, VirTues supports various tasks including cell segmentation, niche annotation, and zero-shot annotation across datasets. In triple-negative breast cancer, biomarkers derived from VirTues successfully predicted chemo-immunotherapy response and stratified survival, outperforming current clinical stratification schemes.

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