BELFAST, 21 June 2016.  The Belfast-based digital pathology firm, PathXL, has been sold to the multinational health technology company, Philips.

PathXL specialises in software that improves the analysis of cancer tumours.

It was established in 2004 as a spinout from Queen’s University Belfast and currently employs 30 people.

Philips chief executive, Frans van Houten, said: ‘The computer can do a much better job than the human eye, as it is much more systematic in analysing tissues.

‘We’re acquiring a company that has deep clinical knowledge and technology to analyse cancerous cells.’

PathXL was founded by Queen’s University academics Prof Peter Hamilton and Dr Jim Diamond.

They are shareholders in the business that has been through several rounds of funding.

Its backers include Crescent Capital, Beltrae Partners and Invest Northern Ireland.

The terms of the sale have not been disclosed.

BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND, 7 October 2014: Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and UCLA are three of the latest organizations to join the PathXL customer base in North America. Investing heavily in the North American market, PathXL has gained substantial recognition by winning three of the 15 Top Cancer Centers in the USA. These three institutions will benefit from PathXL’s solutions for digital pathology.

PathXL® has a portfolio of platforms for Research, Education and Clinical environments, ranging from the managing, viewing and annotating of digital slides, to solutions for compiling and searching large datasets and image repositories. PathXL also delivers an expanding set of complex algorithms capable of identifying tumor tissue for a number of different cancer types.

Mayo Clinic, one of the largest integrated not-for-profit medical group practices in the world, have recently acquired PathXL’s solution for storing, sharing and scoring tissue microarrays. PathXL’s TMA software works as an efficient solution for histopathology, IHC and FISH analysis on tissue microarrays. The dearrayer and map are a substantial help in keeping track of where pathologists are on the slide and exactly what they are looking at, without having to move the slide. This will therefore provide Mayo a simpler, faster way of scoring their TMAs and improve their overall workflow.

Cleveland Clinic is another high-profile Institution, which will soon begin building a brand new Cancer Center on their main campus – an investment of over $275 million. Cleveland Clinic has chosen PathXL’s TissueMark® software, for automated tumor detection on H&E stained digital slides, to assist them with molecular analysis and biomarker discovery.

As an institution with a major focus on research, Cleveland Clinic expects to have accurate and consistent results for every single sample. Their team found TissueMark to be a valuable aid in streamlining the analysis of tumor tissue, as the software automatically marks up the boundaries for dissection and provides a calculation of the tumor percentage contained within that region. This process will play an important role on freeing Cleveland Clinic’s highly qualified staff from tasks technology can now reliably carry out, thus allowing them to spend more time interpreting those results.

Scott W Binder, Senior vice Chair and Director of Pathology Clinical Services at UCLA, was one of the first to publicly welcome TissueMark, stating that

“This new technology will bring new levels of efficiency and accuracy to tissue annotation.”

Now, UCLA has trusted PathXL with the handling of their telepathology outreach, including the use of PathXL’s Digital Pathology Workflow platform to facilitate the reading of consult cases from China, which eliminated the need for pathologists to be in possession of the actual slides. These slides will now be kept in-house but digitally available for consultation purposes, whenever needed.

Similarly, the David Geffen School of Medicine will be counting on PathXL Tutor to build content based on virtual slides, which can include different modules, made available to the students according to the professors’ preferences and course plan.

Des Speed, CEO of PathXL, commented:

“At PathXL, we have the ambition to be the best in the world at what we do. We are delighted that such prestigious USA organizations have chosen PathXL software for their Digital Pathology needs – further reinforcing the great progress that is being made by our North America team.

We will have much more news like this in the months ahead.”

PathXL’s business in the United States has been growing exponentially and the company has recently held an exclusive event in Boston to promote their newly launched platform, Xplore. A similar event is due to be held in October, in San Francisco, including new additions to what was first introduced early this year at the European Society of Pathology Annual Congress, in London. PathXL’s award winning product, TissueMark, is also due to see its algorithm portfolio extended soon, with prostate to join the existing breast, colorectal and non-small cell lung carcinoma algorithms.

About PathXL PathXL, a Crescent Capital portfolio company, is a global pioneer in the use of web-based solutions for digital pathology, and provides innovative software for use in drug discovery research, clinical sectors, biomarker analysis and education. Their product for the automated identification and annotation of tumour tissue, TissueMark, was awarded Frost and Sullivan 2014 European New Product Innovation Award for Automated Image Analysis for Digital Pathology. PathXL has just launched Xplore – a new application for image and data management, aiming to facilitate studies for Researchers worldwide.