Generic Treatment

The concern: generic treatment

What works for one patient may be ineffective or even harmful for another. In order to build the most effective treatment plan, pathologists need:

The ability to be not only diagnostic, but also prognostic and predictive about how a patient will respond to a particular therapy or drug
The ability to share information with fellow pathologists quickly, in order to gain outside opinions on difficult cases

We are witnessing significant challenges to our traditional role as laboratory physicians from other medical disciplines and private interests outside the usual boundaries of clinical medicine. To establish pathology's primary place in genome-era medicine, we must acquire and demonstrate expertise in this rapidly evolving era of personalized and patient-centered health care. ⁵

The solution: personalized treatment

Arming pathologists with better diagnostic tools enables them to make more accurate diagnoses that lead to more appropriate treatment plans.

Those tools include:

Automated advanced staining—prognostic and predictive technology helps physicians form personalized treatment plans
Digital pathology—sharper view of patterns in tissue can be shared instantly between pathologists all over the world

Learn More

A National Agenda for the Future of Pathology in Personalized Medicine

_{5: Am J Clin Pathol. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 Nov 2. Published in final edited form as: Am J Clin Pathol. 2011 May; 135(5): 668-672. doi: 10.1309/AJCP9GDNLWB4GACI PMCID: PMC4629248 NIHMSID: NIHMS707242 PMID: 21502420 A National Agenda for the Future of Pathology in Personalized Medicine Report of the proceedings of a meeting at the Banbury Conference Center: Genome-Era Pathology, Precision Diagnostics and Pre-emptive Care: A Stakeholder Summit Peter J. Tonellato, PhD,1,2 James M. Crawford, MD, PhD,3 Mark S. Boguski, MD, PhD,1,2 and Jeffrey E. Saffitz, MD, PhD1}

Slow Turnaround Time

Time is of the essence when it comes to getting tissue biopsy results back to patients.
But pathology labs face obstacles that can impede the delivery of fast, accurate results:

Manual "dip and dunk" staining can compromise the integrity of tissue samples
Hand labeling can lead to sample misidentification
A lack of sample tracking can lead to lost samples

Errors and Solutions

The pathologist's diagnosis of a tissue sample plays a key role in determining what kind of treatment patients receive, and what sort of outcomes they can expect. But because of errors such as mislabeling and cross contamination, specimens in the lab can be mistaken for those of another patient, leading to misdiagnosis.

Slide and Cassette Labeling

Hand labeling creates the potential for errors that can occur at a number of touch points in the pathology lab as a patient's tissue biopsy is processed.

Cross Contamination

In many labs today, the primary staining process is completed manually through "dipping and dunking" slides into shared reagent baths.

Lost Samples

In the diagnostic process, tissue is precious. Going back for more tissue is difficult and sometimes impossible. For this reason, each tissue sample must be closely protected, every step of the journey through the pathology lab.

Generic Treatment

What works for one patient may be ineffective or even harmful for another. In order to build the most effective treatment plan, pathologists need:

The ability to be not only diagnostic, but also prognostic and predictive about how a patient will respond to a particular therapy or drug
The ability to share information with fellow pathologists quickly, in order to gain outside opinions on difficult cases

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