What You Should Know:
– The U.S. government’s Joint Pathology Center, which
houses the world’s largest human tissue repository, today announced that
Proscia, a leading digital and AI pathology company, will provide end-to-end
modernization of JPC’s pathology operations.
– The multi-phase project will digitize the world’s
largest human pathology specimen repository in order to enhance biomedical
research for cancer and infectious diseases like COVID-19, and enable easier
data sharing with researchers, diagnosticians, and educators to facilitate
medical advances.
– The digitization of JPC’s repository will also unlock
previously untapped medical data in order to accelerate the development of
AI-powered pathology applications for building personalized therapeutics.
Joint Pathology Center (JPC),
the premiere pathology reference center for the U.S. government, has selected Proscia’s Concentriq platform
for a complete transformation of its pathology practice. Proscia is a Philadelphia,
PA-based provider of digital and computational pathology solutions.
Modernize World’s Largest Human Tissue Repository
The Joint Pathology Center seeks to preserve, modernize, and
grow the nation’s oldest tissue repository to promote biomedical research. Over
the past century, it has collected approximately 55 million glass slides, 31
million paraffin-embedded tissue blocks, and over 500,000 wet tissue samples,
which have provided critical insight into our understanding of current and
future disease; data from the repository was used to sequence the 1918
influenza virus that killed more than 40 million people worldwide and can
similarly help us to combat COVID-19. The
rise of digital pathology, which captures high-resolution images of tissue
specimen, is enabling JPC to realize even more value from its data by making it
readily accessible to clinicians, pathologists, and healthcare data analysts.
Digital pathology also gives way to the introduction of computational pathology
applications leveraging artificial intelligence to unlock new insights that
drive drug discovery and routine diagnosis.
At the center of this modernization effort, JPC will
digitize its tissue archive, the world’s largest repository of human pathology
specimen, to capitalize on this invaluable source of medical data. The digital
repository will provide increased access to data for driving medical advances
related to infectious diseases and cancer as well as accelerate the development
of computational pathology applications establishing diagnosis, prognosis, and
personalized therapies for patients.
Proscia’s Concentriq Platform to Serve As Foundation for
Digital and Computational Pathology
As digitizing the world’s largest human tissue archive
depends on scalable software infrastructure, JPC has selected Proscia’s Concentriq digital and
computational pathology platform to provide this foundation. Concentriq is a
singular image and data management platform that unifies pathology operations
across the connected enterprise and accelerates workflows. With Concentriq, JPC
will provide its network of researchers with intuitive, secure access to its
data and streamline collaboration, enabling them to more easily analyze
thousands of diseases and find new ways to fight them. Additionally, JPC will
deploy Concentriq to digitize its routine pathology consultations and overcome
the delays that result from sharing physical specimen in an effort to improve
patient outcomes by providing accurate, timely pathology findings.
Why It Matters
Digitizing the repository also holds significant potential
for advancing the development of computational pathology applications spanning
diagnosis, prognosis, and personalized care. Training and validating even a
single application requires massive volumes of images to ensure that it can
account for the variability seen in practice, and JPC’s archive is unmatched in
its ability to provide this data for countless diseases and use cases. As JPC
delivers these applications, it can deploy them, along with other computational
solutions, into its research and clinical workflows leveraging Proscia’s
Concentriq.
“JPC’s modernization effort marks a monumental leap forward for the field of pathology, and we’re excited to be a part of it,” said David West, CEO of Proscia. “Concentriq sits at the intersection of digital and computational pathology across research and clinical practice, providing JPC with the tools needed to finally realize the full promise of its data and transform routine diagnosis.”
