Tissue-based Diagnostics / Histopathology

The development of new 'personalized' therapies depends on the identification of appropriate biomarkers. These biomarkers play an increasing role in drug development and treatment as a way of stratifying patients - identifying those individuals with higher and lower response rates and those that experience greater and lesser side effects.

The interest in biomarkers, especially multiplexing biomarkers, in tissue-based studies has created a growing demand for automated methods that quantify biomarker expression in images, particularly in the context of certain microanatomical units. To date, however, the reliable automated extraction of structural units in tissue has proved too difficult a task. Automated detection systems currently on the market often use methods of estimation that are unreliable. The only way to achieve true accuracy is to extract the morphological entities, which they usually cannot do.

With Definiens you can develop applications that identify relevant morphological entities automatically and so give precise, repeatable results. The technology can handle all types of stains or tests including protein expression (IHC, florescence, quantum dots) or gene probes (FISH, SISH).

Definiens opens new avenues in tissue-based diagnostics. Multiplexing enables researches to undertake a variety of tests on the same morphological units – the holy grail of tissue-based diagnostics. The relationship between different biomarkers can be explored and correlated with clinical and/or molecular data, facilitating a far more nuanced understanding of disease progression and personalized treatment.

Find out how Definiens TissueMap was used to automatically detect structural units in tissue.

Download the poster “Detailed quantification of biomarker expression in the context of relevant morphological units”.