NEW YORK – Digital pathology firm PathPresenter originally began in 2017 as a way for pathologists to share slides with colleagues, but after several years of expansion and a $7.5 million Series A financing round that closed last month, the firm has grown to encompass education, clinical, and research applications.
Cofounder Rajendra Singh was a pathologist who wanted an easy way to share his scanned pathology slides with colleagues, so he put them on the cloud and allowed other pathologists to view and comment on them, PathPresenter CEO Patrick Myles said. The platform began as a free public platform for pathology education largely for individual pathologists, but it has since evolved into a platform with institutional educational licenses, clinical applications, and research capabilities for capturing annotations, Myles said.
"Most software that's out there has been developed by engineers … [but] ours was developed by a pathologist," Myles said. "This is a guy who knows what the problems are, he knows where the gaps are, and … he's built a really strong level of trust with the community."
In a digital pathology ecosystem that includes whole-slide scanners for digital images, artificial intelligence algorithms for research and diagnosis, laboratory information systems, and storage reporting platforms, PathPresenter's value proposition is that it takes "all of these different components, and we make sure they're fully integrated and interoperable so that pathologists can just do their work," Myles said.
The Montville, New Jersey-based firm's platform can be used with images scanned by different scanners in a variety of file formats, while it also integrates with multiple major AI algorithms and works with a multitude of electronic medical record systems to ensure it can be used within hospital networks, he added.
Although the software platform includes four different modules for clinical case management, consulting, education, and research, PathPresenter has structured its business to allow customers to pick and choose their own solution, Myles said. Some institutions, such as Yale University School of Medicine, only use the education component to train new pathology residents, while other academic medical centers use the entire suite.
Academic medical centers are a major customer base for the company, considering they tend to have many pathologists performing many different tasks. For example, many academic medical centers have their pathologist subspecialty experts available to provide second opinions on cases for smaller or international hospitals without the same expertise, and those cases can be viewed through PathPresenter's platform, Myles noted. Academic medical centers also often have their pathologists doing continuing education or research projects and can use PathPresenter to help with those tasks, he said.
PathPresenter also has a large customer base of individual users, Myles said. Nearly 60,000 pathologists use the firm's public platform for education, and that base can be capitalized on. "A lot of people have been trained on PathPresenter with our education platform, and so when the time comes for them to want to scale up their full digital pathology program, then they're already familiar with our platform," Myles said.
The public platform requires registration but is free to use and comes with 10 gigabytes of storage and access to the image viewer. Users can upload their slides and share them instantly with someone or upload a presentation and select slides to present findings at a conference, Myles said.
There are also paid tiers for users who want more storage, along with the enterprise licenses available to entire institutions. Currently, the firm has 50 institutions with enterprise licenses, Myles said.
Matthew Hanna, vice chair of pathology informatics at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said that he has been using PathPresenter as an individual since 2017. "At the time, there were no publicly available digital images" that were easily accessible. PathPresenter, he added, offered a "vast repository of interesting cases" to study and served as a "place to aggregate all of these things that we do on a day-to-day basis on one platform."
Hanna added that he doesn't know of any other system that consists of education, research, and clinical applications with consults — many other platforms have one or two pieces, such as a clinical research module, but they are not as in-depth with the conferencing and presentation options.
He also emphasized the importance of having a team of pathologists leading the company because "that sort of understanding really helps with the workflow."
"They have the pathologist in mind, and I think that really just speaks toward how the user interface, user experience, [and] the workflow" function, he said.
Hanna did note that PathPresenter has a relatively small team compared to its competitors, such as Sectra, Proscia, or Indica Labs, and that the company will eventually have to expand its team to continue supporting its customers.
The firm is also preparing for the regulatory submission of its software in the US. Often, hospitals buy different scanners and software and validate them using the College of American Pathologists' guidelines for digital pathology as laboratory-developed tests, since "there's no way for every piece of hardware with every software, every single monitor" to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.
But with the release of the recent FDA rule governing LDTs, the field is "generally getting into a period where [companies] do need to have FDA [approval]," and should probably have their products approved for use with multiple whole-slide scanners, Myles said.
Part of the funding from the company's Series A financing will be used to work toward FDA approval of its software platform.
Digital pathology adoption across the US has been driven by the potential for AI-based modules and algorithms, Myles noted. One key component of PathPresenter's technology is its ability to integrate many different third-party algorithms within its clinical module. The image management system and viewing platform serve as a "central hub" for a pathologist to access multiple algorithms upon opening the clinical viewer, rather than having to use different image viewers with each different algorithm.
"No hospital wants to do a deal with 10 different AI vendors," he said. PathPresenter is a "great platform for AI companies to partner with in order to get their AI algorithms into regular use by institutions."