What You Should Know:
– Proscia secures $23M in Series B
funding led by Scale Venture Partners for its AI-enabled digital pathology
solutions.
– Proscia will use the funding to expand its AI application portfolio, boost commercial expansion, and advance its regulatory strategy to secure FDA approval.
Proscia, a Philadelphia-based provider of digital and
computational pathology solutions, today announced it has secured $23M in
Series B funding led by Scale
Venture Partners, with participation from Hitachi Ventures, the strategic
corporate venture capital arm of Hitachi,
Ltd., bringing its funding total to $35 million.
Importance of Pathology
Pathology is at the center of cancer
diagnosis and guides a patient’s entire cancer journey, yet pathologists and
their ability to diagnose cancer are largely dependent on the microscope that
has been in place for 150 years. The limitations of the microscope and the
subjectivity involved in assessing tumors contribute to diagnostic error,
resulting in negative patient outcomes and economic burden to the healthcare
system.
Creating tools to find data — and fight
cancer.
Founded in 2014 by a team of clinicians at Johns Hopkins and
the University of Pittsburgh, Proscia is a software company that is changing
the way the world practices pathology to transform cancer research and diagnosis.
With its Concentriq®
software platform, Proscia is accelerating the transformation to digital
pathology, which centers around high-resolution images of tissue biopsies, as
the new standard of care. Concentriq combines enterprise scalability with
powerful AI applications to help laboratories, health systems, and life
sciences companies unlock new insights, accelerate breakthroughs, and improve
patient outcomes.
Recent Traction/Milestones
Since closing its Series A round in 2018, Proscia has
amassed a customer base of laboratory titans and digital pathology pioneers as
well as 10 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies. This includes Johns Hopkins
School of Medicine and the Joint Pathology Center (JPC), the premiere pathology
reference center for the U.S. government. JPC selected
Concentriq to drive a complete modernization of its pathology practice and
digitize the world’s largest human tissue repository of over 55 million slides,
unleashing a transformative wave of biomedical research. Proscia also recently
established a Computational
Pathology Center of Excellence with University Medical Center (UMC)
Utrecht, one of the first organizations in the world to implement digital
pathology. As part of this collaboration, UMC Utrecht will deploy Proscia’s AI
applications into its high-throughput workflows leveraging Concentriq.
COVID-19 Drives Growing Adoption of Digital Pathology
Proscia’s commercial traction comes amid a surge in digital
pathology adoption. Laboratories have increasingly shifted to digital to
overcome the manual and subjective nature of the traditional standard of care
and keep pace with the rising cancer burden. In the U.S. alone, pathologists
have faced a 42% rise in diagnostic workload over the last decade, a challenge
that will continue to intensify as the total number of cancer cases is
projected to increase by 55% by 2030. Recently, laboratories have been implementing
digital pathology to maintain operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, as
digitization is the only means by which they can continue to serve patients.
Expansion Plans
The infusion of capital will enable Proscia to continue to
meet growing demand for digital pathology across research and diagnostics. The
company will use the funds to accelerate commercial expansion, ramping up its
global sales, marketing, and support teams. Proscia will also further drive
pathology’s data-driven future by expanding its data assets and AI application
portfolio, building off of the initial success of its DermAI™ application. The
investment will additionally advance Proscia’s regulatory strategy to secure
FDA clearance, drawing on the foundation that the company has established with
its CE Mark and MDSAP certification.
“We are excited for this next milestone in our journey,”
said David West, CEO of Proscia. “Over the past few years, we have battle
tested Concentriq at leading organizations and demonstrated the unprecedented
potential of AI. In welcoming Scale Venture Partners and Hitachi Ventures to
the Proscia team, we are better positioned than ever before to drive a
transformation that will impact millions of cancer patients and their
families.”
