Author: Visiopharm

Visiopharm, a global leader in AI-driven precision pathology software, has joined forces with Grundium, a renowned provider of high-quality imaging solutions for digital pathology, to expand the availability of accessible digital pathology solutions for clinics and laboratories worldwide. Through this partnership, Visiopharm will offer Grundium’s Ocus® scanners alongside its Qualitopix™ solution, enabling labs to automatically upload images for processing. Qualitopix empowers labs to enhance their staining quality and standardization by monitoring staining consistency.

Grundium’s Ocus scanners are well-known for their exceptional image quality, user-friendly design, and compact footprint. Seamlessly integrating with computational pathology applications, these scanners provide an affordable option for accelerating the adoption of pathology AI applications. With a web-based user interface and cloud connectivity, the Ocus scanner portfolio stands out as practical imaging instruments for digital pathology.

Qualitopix combines powerful AI technology with control materials, enabling labs to continuously monitor and document staining consistency over time. By utilising standardized and validated control materials, labs can obtain reliable and actionable insights that help identify staining performance variations. One of the key advantages of Qualitopix is its simplicity, speed, and cost-effectiveness. As a web-based solution, labs can seamlessly incorporate it into their existing workflows, unlocking the benefits of digital pathology without significant implementation efforts. The integration of Grundium’s Ocus scanners enhances the automation of Visiopharm’s Qualitopix™ solution by facilitating the automatic upload of images.

Martin Kristensson, Senior Vice President, Clinical Commercial Strategy at Visiopharm, said:

At Visiopharm, we are constantly seeking ways to help pathology labs standardize their work. Our partnership with Grundium and the integration of the Ocus scanner with our Qualitopix solution offer a powerful combination of high-quality imaging and staining monitoring, providing pathology labs with the necessary tools to gain insights into their daily performance. We are excited to introduce these innovative digital pathology solutions to more clinics and labs worldwide, aiming to make a positive impact on standardization.

Davide D’Incau, Grundium Sales Director, said:  “Breakthroughs in AI and computational pathology will significantly impact the field of pathology. Grundium is dedicated to making these innovations widely accessible to clinicians and labs by providing the most practical imaging instruments for digital pathology in the market. We are thrilled to include the Ocus® scanners as part of Visiopharm’s solutions, starting with Qualitopix.”

About Visiopharm

Visiopharm® is a leading provider of AI-driven precision pathology software for research and diagnostics. In research, it is a technology leader providing tools that help scientists, pathologists, and image analysis experts produce accurate data for all types of tissue-based research. In diagnostics, it is a leader within clinical applications, with no less than eight diagnostic algorithms cleared under IVDR for EU customers. These applications provide diagnostic decision support and and can be easily activated and integrated into existing lab workflows.

Founded in 2002, Visiopharm is privately owned and operates internationally with over 750 customer accounts in more than 40 countries. The company’s headquarters are located in Denmark’s Medicon Valley, with offices in Sweden, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, and local representation in France and China.

About Grundium

A global leader in advanced imaging technology, Grundium makes digital pathology and best professional diagnosis available for all life – whether human, animal, plant or other. This is achieved by doing something that nobody else can: applying state-of-the-art mobile technology in digital pathology. Established in 2015 by ex-Nokia engineers, the Tampere-based company is democratizing digital pathology with the Ocus® microscope scanners. The cutting-edge imaging solutions are based on over 20 years of experience in optics, sensors and beautiful high-precision devices. Grundium serves various industries and businesses enhancing quality and processes, protecting human life and safeguarding a clean environment.

Contact: 

Johanne Louise Brændgaard
Chief Marketing Officer
jlb@visiopharm.com

Visiopharm, a leading provider of AI-driven precision pathology software for research and diagnostics, and Agilent Technologies Inc., a world leader in life sciences, diagnostics, and applied chemical markets, have announced a strategic partnership to provide pharma with advanced and comprehensive solutions to support the acceleration of precision medicine. 

Breakthroughs in immuno-oncology are revolutionizing cancer care with new and promising targeted treatments. That has created a need for robust and reliable patient selection for clinical trials, bringing targeted treatments to market, and optimal treatment decisions. Tissue biomarkers provide valuable spatially resolved information about protein expression in the tumor micro-environment. 

AI-driven precision pathology has the potential to play a crucial role in developing powerful new predictive assays. It provides a powerful tool for discovery of new biomarkers through the analysis of multiplexed image data, developing investigational devices for clinical trials, and developing scoring principles for novel tissue biomarkers. Moreover, it can aid in the development of image analysis for standardized and automated reading of increasingly complex biomarkers. AI-driven precision pathology from Visiopharm can also be used for measuring and managing staining consistency, which is often vital for both clinical trials and decentralized deployment of new predictive assays. 

The Visiopharm-Agilent partnership will provide a toolbox for AI-driven precision pathology, enabling Pharma to accelerate clinical development by improving patient selection in clinical testing and ultimately supporting diagnostic applications through AI-driven, standardized decision support  biomarker expression. The partnership also provides solutions for monitoring staining consistency in clinical development and clinical practice, further supporting biomarker standardization. 

Michael Grunkin, CEO, Visiopharm, said: “We are excited to strengthen our strategic collaboration with Agilent to accelerate the development of new drug-diagnostic assays. This global collaboration will allow us to support an increasingly important precision medicine agenda.” 

Paul Beresford, VP/GM, Companion Diagnostics, Agilent, said: “We’re thrilled to partner with Visiopharm in providing advanced digital pathology and AI-based solutions to accelerate biomarker discovery and clinical development. Together, we are committed to enabling pharma to bring innovative and tailored treatments to patients faster, ultimately advancing precision medicine.” 

The partnership expands upon the existing relationship between Visiopharm and Agilent, who have been collaborating on the development of several quantitative IVD APPs and announced a worldwide distribution agreement. 

About Visiopharm

Visiopharm® is a leading provider of AI-driven precision pathology software for research and diagnostics. In research, it is a technology leader providing tools that help scientists, pathologists, and image analysis experts produce accurate data for all types of tissue-based research. In diagnostics, it is a leader within clinical applications, with no less than eight diagnostic algorithms cleared under IVDR for EU customers. These applications provide diagnostic decision support and and can be easily activated and integrated into existing lab workflows.

Founded in 2002, Visiopharm is privately owned and operates internationally with over 750 customer accounts in more than 40 countries. The company’s headquarters are located in Denmark’s Medicon Valley, with offices in Sweden, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, and local representation in France and China.

Contact: 

Johanne Louise Brændgaard
Chief Marketing Officer
jlb@visiopharm.com

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) announced today a highly-anticipated end-to-end solution for digital pathology that brings together best-in-class products from Agilent, Visiopharm, Proscia®, and Hamamatsu Photonics K.K. The announcement coincides with the USCAP 112th Annual Meeting held March 11-16 at the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, Louisiana.   

The increasing prevalence of chronic conditions is predicted to intensify the urgency of pathologists seeking to adopt innovative digital pathology solutions to improve existing patient diagnostic imaging methods and reduce the high cost associated with traditional diagnostics. Technological advances in the past decade and the numerous benefits of digital pathology are driving the practice to become widely adopted.

Agilent and Visiopharm have collaborated since 2020, developing an integrated solution comprising Visiopharm’s portfolio of leading artificial intelligence (AI)-driven precision pathology software and Agilent’s automated pathology staining solutions. The collaboration also includes a distribution agreement, initially in Europe but now expanded to include the US and Canada. Agilent and Visiopharm have also broadened their development services to include digital pathology applications that will increasingly benefit the global pharmaceutical industry by providing access to Visiopharm’s AI capabilities to deliver innovative, high-quality companion diagnostics.

“Agilent has meticulously and diligently been working toward the development of a complete end-to-end digital pathology solution to help pathology labs increase efficiency, clinical utility, quality control, and ultimately patient care,” said Lou Welebob, vice president and general manager of Agilent’s Pathology Division, Diagnostics and Genomics Group.

“Our objective was to work with industry innovators, starting with Visiopharm as our initial partner. We are now excited to announce that we have expanded our offering through the addition of two other partners Proscia and Hamamatsu, in this fast-growing digital pathology space,” Welebob added.

“Together, we have enabled pathologists to improve patient care through the integration of our AI-driven precision pathology software and Agilent’s automated staining solutions,” said Michael Grunkin, CEO of Visiopharm. “We are delighted to further extend our partnership in this emerging era of personalized medicine.”

The recent announcements include Proscia, a leader in digital pathology solutions, and Hamamatsu, a leading provider of whole slide imaging systems. The technology combination of Agilent, Visiopharm, Proscia, and Hamamatsu strengthens the development of an open and agnostic end-to-end digital pathology solution with the vision of accelerating breakthroughs in precision medicine.

USCAP attendees are invited to visit Agilent’s exhibition booth #129 and learn about these partnerships, products, and solutions. Agilent is also bringing together partners and industry thought leaders to discuss the future of cancer care and how an open, agnostic system can dramatically change the future of cancer care. Presenters will include Alan Byrne, Principal Global Product Manager, Digital Pathology, Agilent Technologies; David West, CEO, Proscia; Saira Shah, M.D., Physician Pathologist and Breast Consultant Pathologist, Quest Diagnostics; Martin Kristensson, Senior Vice President, Global Clinical Sales, Visiopharm; and Giovanni Lujan, M.D., Director of Digital and Computational Pathology, Ohio State University. Additional information about this event will be available at the Agilent booth.  

About Agilent Technologies

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) is a global leader in the life sciences, diagnostics, and applied chemical markets, delivering insight and innovation that advance the quality of life. Agilent’s full range of solutions includes instruments, software, services, and expertise that provide trusted answers to our customers’ most challenging questions. The company generated revenue of $6.85 billion in fiscal 2022 and employs 18,000 people worldwide. Information about Agilent is available at www.agilent.com. To receive the latest Agilent news, please subscribe to the Agilent Newsroom. Follow Agilent on LinkedIn and Facebook.

About Visiopharm

Visiopharm® is a leading provider of AI-driven precision pathology software for research and diagnostics. In research, it is a technology leader providing tools that help scientists, pathologists, and image analysis experts produce accurate data for all types of tissue-based research. In diagnostics, it is a world leader within clinical applications, with no less than eight diagnostic algorithms cleared under IVDR for EU customers. These applications provide diagnostic decision support and quality assurance and can be easily activated and integrated into existing lab workflows.

Founded in 2002, Visiopharm is privately owned and operates internationally with over 750 customer accounts in more than 40 countries. The company’s headquarters are located in Denmark’s Medicon Valley, with offices in Sweden, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, and local representation in France and China.

For enquiries: 

Naomi Goumillout
Agilent Technologies
+1.781.266.2819
naomi.goumillout@agilent.com

Johanne Louise Brændgaard
Chief Marketing Officer
jlb@visiopharm.com

Visiopharm, a leading provider of AI-driven precision pathology software, has announced the launch of a next-generation Ki67 algorithm providing diagnostic decision support for pathologists. The algorithm, which has been cleared under the European In-Vitro Diagnostic Regulations (IVDR), is designed to be completely automated, allowing pathologists to become fully productive without manual steps.

Ki67 is a widely used biomarker that identifies the proliferation rate of cancer cells to determine the aggressiveness of a tumor and subsequently guide treatment decisions. To support optimal treatment decisions, standardization is required to minimize the impact of inter- and intra-reader variability. More recently, the Ki67 protein expression has also been shown to correlate with response to immune checkpoint inhibitors, thus potentially granting Ki67 an important role in the deployment of precision medicine.

“The Visiopharm algorithm is helping us achieve standardization in the scoring of Ki67 for breast cancer patients. We look forward to having the algorithm fully automated and integrated into our workflow saving us time and effort while also improving accuracy and consistency in our results”, said Paul van Diest, Head of Pathology at UMC Utrecht.

Agilent Technologies Inc. had approached Visiopharm to validate assays for the Omnis platform, and the next generation Ki67 algorithm has now been added to the growing portfolio of fully automated workflow APPs validated for and operable with Agilent’s systems.

Lou Welebob, Vice President and General Manager for Agilent’s Pathology Division, Diagnostic and Genomics Group, stated, “We decided to develop AI-based APPs for Her2, Ki67, and PD-L1 for our assays and the Omnis platform. HER2 was the first with IVDR clearance followed by Ki67, and PD-L1 is not far behind. We believe this level of automation is required to deploy AI-driven precision pathology at scale, and Visiopharm has a go-to-market strategy that will enable accelerated deployment of computational pathology. The fact that Visiopharm already has several IVDR-cleared digital assays on the market and is fully committed to obtaining FDA clearance as well, made this collaboration ideal for Agilent.”

Automation of the Ki67 algorithm removes key barriers for adoption in routine use by incorporating multiple steps: detection of patient tissue, elimination of slide artifacts (tears, folds, pen-marks, out-of-focus, etc.), robust identification of invasive tumor cells, cell classification, quantification, and visualization of tumor heterogeneity (heatmaps and hot-spots).

“We are thrilled to launch this next-generation Ki67 algorithm. We believe that automation of the full image analysis pipeline will have a significant impact on the adoption of AI in routine use. We are committed to making this technology widely available to pathologists, eliminating the adoption and activation barriers that has so far been a challenge to achieve immediate productivity and a measurable return on investment”, said Dirk Vossen, Chief Diagnostics Officer at Visiopharm.

About Visiopharm

Visiopharm® is a leading provider of AI-driven precision pathology software for research and diagnostics. In research, it is a technology leader providing tools that help scientists, pathologists, and image analysis experts produce accurate data for all types of tissue-based research. In diagnostics, it is a world leader within clinical applications, with no less than eight diagnostic algorithms cleared under IVDR for EU customers. These applications provide diagnostic decision support and quality assurance and can be easily activated and integrated into existing lab workflows.

Founded in 2002, Visiopharm is privately owned and operates internationally with over 750 customer accounts in more than 40 countries. The company’s headquarters are located in Denmark’s Medicon Valley, with offices in Sweden, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, and local representation in France and China.

For enquiries: 

Johanne Louise Brændgaard
Chief Marketing Officer
jlb@visiopharm.com

Visiopharm today announces that it will be entering into a research pilot with Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) to investigate the use of AI-powered precision pathology solutions for quality assurance of immunohistochemistry (IHC) interpretations.

This research agreement will first focus on the utilization of Visiopharm’s AI-driven HER2 algorithm to review specimens in-tandem with traditional IHC and FISH testing. The algorithm has shown the potential to identify tumors with a so-called HER2-low status, a traditionally challenging group to identify through manual IHC interpretation.

A secondary phase of the agreement will aim to expand the research capabilities to other analysis algorithms, or APPs, in the Oncotopix software, which include additional breast cancer biomarkers like ER, PR, Ki67 and H&E metastasis. These APPs are already IVDR certified in Europe, where they are used in a clinical setting.

Martin Kristensson, SVP Clinical Strategy, Visiopharm said:

“The proper classification of HER2 status in stained tissue sections is critical to precision pathology and personalized medicine of cancer patients. Borderline cases require additional timely and costly assessments, including reflex, in situ hybridization (ISH) testing. This collaboration is another exciting milestone for Visiopharm, expanding our research work with leading institutions throughout the United States and Europe. Our AI-powered software solutions and APPs will support the robust needs and requirements of MGH throughout this pilot.”

Amanda Lowe, Managing Director, Americas, Visiopharm, said:

“This is another powerful example of research being applied to translate the value of AI-powered digital pathology; a critical need in driving greater value, efficiency, and precision into pathology. Dr. Lennerz has great passion and conviction to moving the digital pathology industry forward and we are proud to be collaborating with him and the team and MGH.

Dr. Jochen K. Lennerz, Medical Director, Center for Integrated Diagnostics, Massachusetts General Hospital:

“Precise interpretation is crucial – especially for identification of patients with HER2-low expressing tumors. These patients form an important subgroup that benefit from novel treatment strategies. The identification of this population has been traditionally challenging and in this research project, we aim to understand what computational tools could help improve identification of these patients.”

About Visiopharm

Visiopharm® is a world leader in AI-driven precision pathology software. Their pioneering image analysis tools support thousands of scientists, pathologists, and image analysis experts in academic institutions, biopharmaceutical industry, and diagnostic centers. AI-based image analysis and tissue mining tools support research and drug development research worldwide, while CE-IVD APPs provide decision support. With the most advanced and sophisticated artificial intelligence and deep learning, Visiopharm delivers tissue data mining tools, precision results, and workflows.

Visiopharm was founded in 2002 and is privately owned. The company operates internationally with over 750 customer accounts and countless users in more than 40 countries. The company headquarters are in Denmark’s Medicon Valley, with offices in Sweden, England, Germany, The Netherlands and United States.

For enquiries: 

Johanne Louise Brændgaard
Chief Marketing Officer
jlb@visiopharm.com