Tissue Samples Marked with Unprecedented Accuracy

An innovative technology has been developed that will soon enable pathologists to automate the process of marking tissue samples with unparalleled accuracy.

The leap in sophistication and accuracy of the method has been described by scientists as being the equivalent of the shift from a freehand outline sketch of a country's border to a high-resolution map of the whole country.

The technology called TissueMark (PathXL; Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK) has innovative software that will help accelerate cancer diagnosis and discovery, reduce time in drug development, and identify new markers of the disease. Currently an estimated 25 million tissue samples are analyzed annually. Based on these volumes TissueMark has the potential to save pathologists a combined 250,000 working days of effort per annum and complete the same work with pinpoint accuracy in one fiftieth of the time.

The accuracy of TissueMark combined with huge increases in the speed of processing, opens the gateway to faster and more accurate diagnoses and the development of treatments by truncating the diagnostic process and marking slides with a level of precision that cannot be achieved in manual intervention. The first release is built to check for the potential presence of lung, colorectal, and breast cancers. Work is near completion on additional software modules to check for the possible presence of several other forms of cancer, including ovarian and prostate cancer. The software will be compatible with all major scanning technologies.

Des Speed, the CEO of PathXL, said, “It is now widely accepted that identifying the molecular signature in individual tumors is vital to the development and selection of targeted therapies. Technologies, such as TissueMark, are now emerging that enable scientists to achieve this. Equipping pathologists with our technology will lead to faster, better diagnosis and the potential to make significant savings in time and resource at a time when the burden on medical services is rising rapidly.”

Scott Binder, MD, Director of Pathology Clinical Services at the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine (University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA), said, “I welcome the development of this new TissueMark technology which will bring new levels of efficiency and accuracy to tissue annotation, freeing pathology professionals worldwide to focus their time and expertise on their most important work, the accurate and timely diagnosis of tumors and other disorders.”

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University of California