The Daily Scan

Guardian Technologies poised to enter tuberculosis pathology market

HealthImaging reports Guardian Technologies poised to enter tuberculosis pathology market:

Guardian has expanded its relationship with the Aurum Institute for Health Research to include collaboration on product development and commercialization, as well as marketing and distribution rights in South Africa for Guardian's prototype designed to automatically detect and quantify tuberculosis.

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Using Signature Mapping technology integrated into a digital pathology workflow system will improve diagnostic detection accuracy, reduce diagnostic processing time and lower the cost to analyze sputum microscopy specimens for tuberculosis, according to the company.

This is pretty cool, more and more companies are devising clinical tests based on digital pathology.  Many of them are software tests rather than chemical tests - a pretty amazing transformation...

Advance Laboratory: Benefits of Digital Pathology

Here's a nice article in Advance Laboratory on the Benefits of Digital Pathology:

Digital pathology is having a major impact in improving the delivery of results for pathologists, researchers and laboratories around the world.

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To understand the significance of digital pathology, one needs to first understand some of the limitations associated with traditional microscope use, including single field of view/single magnification viewing, manual slide analysis, physical reliance of a microscope and cumbersome archival and retrieval. Microscope-based pathology also makes it difficult to manage large volumes of glass slides, perform quantitative/qualitative analysis of cellular detail or facilitate secondary consultations or the sharing of information with colleagues, which often requires physically transporting the glass slide to a specialized pathologist in a remote location.

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Once a glass slide has been digitized, specialized server software makes it possible to access, view and navigate around digital slide images via the Internet. Since a digital slide is a complete representation of the glass microscope slide, it transforms a computer monitor into a virtual microscope and a platform for sharing information simultaneously throughout a pathology community.

Good stuff from my colleague Raymond Tecotsky.

European payers question value of new cancer drugs

The Guardian (London) reports European payers question value of new cancer drugs.

Cancer is the fastest-growing section of the drugs market but developing new treatments is only half the battle. Persuading payers to use them, particularly in Europe, is another matter.

Recent multi-billion dollar bids for Genentech and ImClone by Roche and Bristol-Myers Squibb highlight Big Pharma's desire to secure revenues from modern cancer blockbusters like Avastin and Erbitux.

Yet use of both these medicines remains controversial in key European markets, where state-backed healthcare systems are struggling with the escalating cost of cancer treatments.

The issue has come to a head in Britain, where the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has led the world in assessing the cost-effectiveness of drugs since 1999.

Similar "health technology assessment" bodies are blossoming across Europe as authorities seek a rational way to assess whether costly new targeted cancer therapies, which may improve life expectancy by a few months, are worth using.

Interesting...  to me this is one of the best arguments against national health insurance.  Each person should be able to decide this sort of thing, whether a given drug is worth the money.  A global decision on behalf of everyone is almost never going to be right for everyone.

Bringing Good Things to Life Science

Of possible interest, TheScientist ran an interesting article about General Electric's increasing presence in Life Sciences: Bringing Good Things to Life Science.  (PDF)

Product-driven research for GE Healthcare's Life Science business division takes place at Amersham's facilities in New Jersey, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, but, for basic research, GE sunk $125 million into renovating its corporate-wide Global Research Center (GRC) in New York, and erected the "D-wing," a 5-story, 3,700 square meter biosciences laboratory, which houses more than 70 life sciences researchers. It employs 1000 PhDs whose expertise ranges from fluid dynamics to polymer design, and who are all going to play a role as GE seeks to cross-leverage its technical expertise and dominate the life sciences market. In addition, GE's life sciences business employs 450 researchers in GE Healthcare, and R&D spending in the life sciences amounts to $1 billion annually.

Even Invitrogen and Thermo Fisher Scientific are dwarfed by the resources available to one branch of a massive conglomerate like GE, and the arrival of this giant harkens a new era in a life sciences market that big business now dominates. So, can GE's glossy new laboratories foster the same innovative atmosphere its acquired companies once prized?

Most of the article is about GE's Amersham acquisition, but their recent digital pathology venture with UPMC, Omnyx, also makes a brief appearance.

Anytime, Anywhere Pathology

HealthIT has a nice article on Anytime, Anywhere Pathology:

Last spring, frequent mortar attacks on Baghdad’s Green Zone repeatedly sent doctors and technicians scrambling for cover, slowing the installation of digital pathology equipment at the Army’s 86th Combat Support Hospital.

The equipment permits doctors there to send scanned images of tissue instantly to Washington for analysis by the U.S. military’s best pathologists.

Bringing digital pathology to Baghdad is part of an ongoing program of upgrades to the U.S. military’s telemedicine capabilities. “We’re trying to provide better consultation services to all of the major military hospitals,” he said.

Using advanced digital scanners, computer networks and sophisticated software — some created for U.S. spy agencies — it is possible to make high-quality, high-resolution images of tissue samples and send them anywhere in the world for analysis.

Very cool, we're starting to see more and more articles outside of pathology (and outside of medicine) discussing this technology, a sign that adoption is increasing and the technology is moving into the mainstream.

Affymetrix receives FDA clearance for the first gene-expression microarray-based test

Affrmetrix has received FDA clearance for the first gene-expression microarray-based test, for tissue of origin (identifying the original source organ of metastasizing cancer cells). 

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cleared for marketing a test that can help health care professionals determine what type of cancer cells are present in a malignant tumor.

The Pathwork Tissue of Origin test compares the genetic material of a patient’s tumor with genetic information on malignant tumor types stored in a database.

It uses a microarray technology to analyze thousands of pieces of genetic material at one time. The test considers 15 common malignant tumor types, including bladder, breast, and colorectal tumors.

That's cool.  (There is more on the FDA's website.)  And at bottom this is a software test, the first of many...