Dr Pia Marie Albano

Dr Pia Marie Albano is a cancer diagnostics researcher at the University of Santo Tomas. She leads teams of biologists, biochemists, medical technologists, medical physicists, clinicians, pathologists, and data scientists to turn laboratory methods into tools that work in real hospitals. She has led nationally funded and internationally supported projects on molecular tests and IR spectroscopy-based cancer diagnostics, generating proof-of-concept evidence in Filipino patients. Trained in molecular biology and IR spectroscopy, she focuses on adapting cutting-edge infrared and AI methods to the realities of low and middle-income health systems.

Dr Albano’s innovation is a modular infrared and AI platform for tissue-based cancer diagnostics, with breast cancer as the first disease area. It uses a single infrared scan and software model to extract diagnostic information from routine tumour sections, reducing reliance on multiple immunohistochemistry stains, molecular tests and gene sequencing. In resource-limited hospitals, where these tests are slow, costly or unavailable, the platform aims to deliver faster, more affordable and consistent results. The same workflow can be adapted to other biomarkers and tumour types, enabling a scalable, low-cost cancer diagnostics suite.