Digital & Computational Pathology - Executive Vice President & CMO, Small Pharma

An executive vice president & CMO at a small pharma company discusses how they utilize and implement digital pathology. Their use of digital pathology includes applications across drug development, focusing on identifying patients who have different therapeutic responses and pathologic responses, with a focus on cancer classification and using biomarkers to predict response. They use both in-house analysis and external vendors for digital pathology, with the majority of work being done by CROs or vendors due to their expertise in the area. This stakeholder is familiar with a range of digital pathology vendors, including Leica, Roche, Zeiss, PathAI,
and Paige. Pain points of using digital pathology they discuss include concerns around regulatory tolerance and precision in predicting outcomes, as well as the challenge of utilizing limited tissue samples to get multiple results. Key market trends they cover include the push to use digital pathology within the clinical trial setting, the integration of AI algorithms in registrational trial settings, and the importance of partnering with diagnostic companies to provide tools that can capture highly specific patient populations.

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