NEW YORK – Backed by a better-than-expected $50 million fundraising round, Proscia plans to expand its commercial workforce by 30 percent over the next six months as the firm bolsters its lineup of artificial intelligence-developed clinical and research-use tools.
Proscia CEO David West said that the investments will help the company to put its foot on the gas pedal to drive up commercial expansion. The Philadelphia-based company said earlier this year that it had a growing user base and expectations that the firm's software would be used to aid the diagnosis of more than 8 million patients in 2025, up from 2.4 million in 2024.
To meet that growing demand and maintain consistency and reliability, West said that the firm is investing in the expansion of its team in lockstep with its commercial growth. He said that the company has about 100 employees and it plans to hire another 30 in engineering, sales, and marketing positions so the firm can build and deliver its products more quickly, support customers, and expand its reach.
"We're growing our sales and marketing team and our support and customer success team really quickly," he said.
West noted that the growth follows US Food and Drug Administration 510(k) clearance a year ago for its Concentriq AP-Dx software for the viewing, interpretation, and management of digital slide images that are used to aid the primary diagnosis of cancer, as well as the company's CE-IVDR certification for the software in 2022. He said that the firm wants to build its commercial network to continue that growth, which he expects will accelerate with increased adoption of digital pathology in coming years.
West said that the $50 million raised in the recent round far exceeded Proscia’s goals. The round was led by software investment firm Insight Partners with contributions from AI Capital Partners, Emerald Development Managers, GPG Healthcare, Fusion Fund, Interwoven Ventures, and Razor's Edge, and it brings the total Proscia has raised to date to $130 million.
While only a minority of pathology labs have so far made the shift from microscopy to scanners and viewing software, use of the technologies has been rising. The College of American Pathologists has said that 28 percent of pathology practice leaders surveyed last year were using digital pathology software, up from 20 percent in 2022. West predicts that the proportion of labs that are using digital pathology will continue rising in coming years.
Meanwhile, Proscia will also use the funding to accelerate its work to connect its life sciences customers with data from its diagnostics customers, starting with access to de-identified patient data. The firm announced in September that it was offering life sciences organizations access to de-identified patient data from its collection of more than 10 million pathology images as well as clinical and genomic data.
West said that life sciences customers can use those data for translational research, biomarker discovery and development, and companion diagnostics development, and he sees an opportunity for pharma customers to use Concentriq's network to connect with labs that have patients who could be candidates for clinical trials.
The recent funding will also support the further development of AI-based tools and their integration with the company's Concentriq platform. While AI-based algorithms are used today to analyze slide images and identify areas of interest, such as those with potential malignancies, he said that the next generation of analysis tools will make better use of the data.
Those upcoming tools could allow pathologists to compare slides against similar images or, for example, slide images from patients with confirmed positive test results for the PD-L1 protein. Other functions could allow pathologists to use natural language to automate sending images to certain pathologists or annotate areas with prostate cancer as well as find their own uses for the tools.
West said that the company is not ready to disclose a product roadmap, but he expects to announce in coming quarters tools for the automation of workflow and quality control tasks.
Proscia also plans to continue building on its OEM partnerships with Agilent Technologies and Siemens Healthineers, and West noted that the firm is forging additional partnerships to bring more AI-developed tests onto the Concentriq platform. The company announced last year that it had formed an alliance of firms that would guarantee that their products would work seamlessly together.
In 2022, Proscia and Siemens inked a multiyear agreement to combine Concentriq with Siemens' Enterprise Imaging offering. West noted that Siemens has established strong relationships with hospital systems through that firm’s imaging business and its software systems, which Proscia may be able to leverage.
Agilent, meanwhile, announced in 2023 that it had signed a multiyear distribution agreement with Proscia to offer the Concentriq Dx platform and said afterward that it had formed an end-to-end digital pathology workflow with Proscia, Visiopharm, and Hamamatsu.
Other firms in the digital pathology space have also been building out their portfolios or forging partnerships to offer labs the tools that they need to switch to digital pathology. Epredia, for example, recently said that the US launch of its clinical-use digital pathology system completes a product lineup from slides to servers, and Philips has announced partnerships that augment its menu.
Agilent officials have said in recent years that they have been trying to forge more partnerships with pharma firms on the development of companion diagnostics, and West noted that he expects demand for slide image-based companion diagnostics that could run on the Concentriq platform.
While pathology is in the early stages of the transition to digital pathology, West said that the expanding volumes of patient data and the rapid development of AI technologies will create more value for customers in life sciences and diagnostics. As that transition happens, he expects that pathology will take on a larger role in precision medicine.