Bringing GigaTIME to Microsoft Foundry: Unlocking Tumor Microenvironment Insights with Multimodal AI

Expanding Microsoft Foundry for Scientific AI Workloads

AI is increasingly being applied to model complex real-world systems, from climate and industrial processes to human biology. In healthcare, one of the biggest challenges is translating routinely available data into deeper biological insight at scale.

GigaTIME is now available in Microsoft Foundry, bringing advanced multimodal capabilities to healthcare and life sciences. This brings advanced multimodal capabilities into Foundry, with Foundry Labs enabling early exploration and the Foundry platform supporting scalable deployment aligned to the model’s intended use.

Read on to understand how GigaTIME works and how you can start exploring it in Foundry.

From Routine Slides to Deep Biological Insight

Understanding how tumors interact with the immune system is central to modern cancer research. While techniques like multiplex immunofluorescence provide these insights, they are expensive and difficult to scale across large patient populations.

GigaTIME addresses this challenge by translating widely available hematoxylin and eosin pathology slides into spatially resolved protein activation maps. This allows researchers to infer biological signals such as immune activity, tumor growth, and cellular interactions at a much deeper level. Developed in collaboration with Providence and the University of Washington, GigaTIME enables analysis of tumor microenvironments across diverse cancer types, helping accelerate discovery and improve understanding of disease biology.

Use cases for GigaTIME

GigaTIME is designed to support research and evaluation workflows across a range of real-world scientific scenarios:

• Population-Scale Tumor Microenvironment Analysis: Enable large-scale analysis of tumor–immune interactions by generating virtual multiplex immunofluorescence outputs from routine pathology slides.
• Biomarker Association Discovery: Identify relationships between protein activation patterns and clinical attributes such as mutations, biomarkers, and disease characteristics.
• Patient Stratification and Cohort Analysis: Segment patient populations across cancer types and subtypes using spatial and combinatorial signals for research and hypothesis generation.
• Clinical Trial Retrospective Analysis: Apply GigaTIME to H&E archives from completed clinical trials to retrospectively characterize tumor microenvironment features associated with treatment outcomes, enabling new insights from existing trial data without additional tissue processing. 
• Tumor–Immune Interaction Analysis: Assess whether immune cells are infiltrating tumor regions or being excluded by analyzing spatial relationships between tumor and immune signals.
• Immune System Structure Characterization: Understand how immune cell populations are organized within tissue to evaluate coordination or fragmentation of immune response.
• Immune Checkpoint Context Interpretation: Examine how immune activity may be locally regulated by analyzing overlap between immune markers and checkpoint signals.
• Tumor Proliferation Analysis: Identify actively growing tumor regions by combining proliferation signals with tumor localization.
• Stromal and Vascular Context Understanding: Analyze how tissue architecture, such as vascular density and desmoplastic stroma, shapes immune cell access to tumor regions, helping characterize mechanisms of immune exclusion or infiltration.

Start with Exploration, Then Go Deeper

Explore in Foundry Labs

Foundry Labs provides a lightweight environment for early exploration of emerging AI capabilities. It allows developers and researchers to quickly understand how models like GigaTIME behave before integrating them into production workflows.

With GigaTIME in Foundry Labs, you can engage with real-world healthcare scenarios and explore how multimodal models translate pathology data into meaningful biological insight.

Through curated experiences, you can:

• Run inference on pathology images
• Visualize spatial protein activation patterns
• Explore tumor and immune interactions in context

This helps you build intuition and evaluate how the model can be applied to your specific use cases.

Go Deeper with GitHub Examples

For advanced scenarios, you can access the underlying notebooks and workflows via GitHub. These examples provide flexibility to customize pipelines, extend workflows, and integrate GigaTIME into broader research and application environments. Together, Foundry Labs and GitHub provide a path from guided exploration to deeper customization.

Discover and Deploy GigaTIME in Microsoft Foundry

Discover in the Foundry Catalog

GigaTIME is available in the Foundry model catalog alongside a growing set of domain-specific models across healthcare, geospatial intelligence, physical systems and more.

Deploy for Research Workflows

For advanced usage, GigaTIME can be deployed as an endpoint within Foundry to support research and evaluation workflows such as:

• Biomarker discovery
• Patient stratification
• Clinical research pipelines

You can start with early exploration in Foundry Labs and transition to scalable deployment on the Foundry platform using the tools and workflows designed for each stage, in line with the intended use of the model.

A New Class of AI for Scientific Discovery

GigaTIME reflects a broader shift toward AI systems designed to model real-world phenomena. These systems are multimodal, deeply tied to domain-specific data, and designed to produce spatial and contextual outputs. They rely on workflows that combine data processing, model inference, and interpretation, which requires platforms that support the full lifecycle from exploration to production. Microsoft Foundry is built to support this evolution.

Learn More and Get Started

To explore GigaTIME in more detail:

• Read the Microsoft Research blog on the underlying research, and population-scale findings.
• Try hands-on scenarios in Foundry Labs
• Access GitHub examples for advanced workflows
• Explore and deploy the model through the Foundry catalog

Looking Ahead

As AI continues to expand into domains like healthcare, climate science, and industrial systems, the ability to connect models, data, and workflows becomes increasingly important. GigaTIME highlights what is possible when these elements come together, transforming routinely available data into actionable scientific insight.

We are excited to see what you build next.