Published in July:
Reading COVID-19’s signature: lung tissue injury
Alain Charles Borczuk, MD, began his practice of pathology as a resident 28 years ago and has spent quite a bit of his career doing autopsies. But it is this year, during the pandemic, that he’s finding some of the best applications of his autopsy work as he seeks to understand the lung injury patterns in SARS CoV-2, or COVID-19 patients. Read more.
Webinars and Sponsored Roundtables — Register Now
Tuesday, April 28, 2026, 12:00 PM–1:00 PM ET
Discover how next-day comprehensive genomic profiling (CGP) is possible with the Oncomine Comprehensive Assay Plus on the Genexus System—delivering both speed and accuracy.
Webinar presenters Jane Bayani, MHSc, PhD, Assistant Professor and Co-Director, Diagnostic Development, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Canada, and Nicola Normanno, MD, Scientific Director, IRCCS Romagnolo Institute for the Study of Tumors, Italy, and Morten Grauslund, PhD, Molecular Biologist, Department of Pathology, Rigshospitalet/Copenhagen University Hospital, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Moderated by: Bob McGonnagle, Publisher, CAP TODAY
CAP TODAY does not endorse any of the products or services named within. The webinar is made possible by a special educational grant from Thermo Fisher Scientific. For Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic applications.
Thursday, April 30, 2026, 11:00 AM–12:00 PM ET
Hear an expert discuss how Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) is utilizing
the oncoReveal® Nexus 21-gene panel to redefine turnaround time and actionable insights
in cancer care. Dr. Ewalt shares a perceptive look at the clinical need for rapid, front-line NGS sequencing, and how a unique, purpose built targeted NGS panel (Pillar Biosciences’ oncoReveal Nexus 21 gene Panel) was developed, validated and implemented clinically by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK-REACT) to complement their current comprehensive genomic profiling (CGP) approach.
Webinar presenter Mark Ewalt, MD, Associate Medical Director for Laboratory Operations for Diagnostic Molecular Pathology in the Molecular Diagnostics Service, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, MSKCC.
Moderated by: Bob McGonnagle, Publisher, CAP TODAY
CAP TODAY does not endorse any of the products or services named within. The webinar is made possible by a special educational grant from Pillar Biosciences.
Thursday, May 28, 2026, 1:00–2:00 PM ET
This session is designed to improve understanding and application of recent updates to synoptic pathology reporting protocols such as the latest Reporting Template for Reporting Results of Biomarker Testing of Specimens from Patients with Carcinoma of the Breast. These changes reflect evolving clinical guidelines that directly influence diagnostic accuracy and treatment selection in breast cancer care.
Webinar presenters Thaer Khoury, MD, FCAP, Chair, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Cente, and Colin Murphy, CEO of mTuitive.
Moderated by: Bob McGonnagle, Publisher, CAP TODAY
Subspecialties
Interactive Product Guides
June 2020
From the President’s Desk: Getting through the pandemic
June 2020—Like so many CAP TODAY readers, I have been spending the vast majority of my time working on COVID-19. In Georgia we have the dubious distinction of having a county with one of the highest per capita death rates due to COVID-19 in the country—at least as of early May when I wrote this. Things are moving so fast with this pandemic that by the time you read this, much will have changed.
Clinical Pathology Selected Abstracts
June 2020—More than 1.7 million new diagnoses of cancer occur in the United States each year, and they are almost exclusively made by pathologists who evaluate patient specimens and issue a written diagnostic report. These patients often are not given the opportunity to talk with the pathologist who made the diagnosis or view their tissue through a microscope. There is little published data on patient-pathologist consultation programs in which patients can review their reports and slides with the pathologist. In addition, the number of patients who may be interested in this service is not known. The authors conducted a study to quantify patients’ interest in patient-pathologist consultation programs and qualitatively analyze their motivations for interest or disinterest.
Anatomic Pathology Selected Abstracts
June 2020—The authors conducted a study in which they independently evaluated the utility and prognostic value of tumor budding according to International Tumour Budding Consensus Conference (ITBCC) criteria in a large well-characterized European gastric cancer cohort. They assessed tumor budding according to the ITBCC criteria for 456 consecutive, surgically treated gastric cancers using the scoring system Bd0 (no buds), Bd1 (one to four buds), Bd2 (five to nine buds), and Bd3 (10 or more buds). Cases with tumor budding were divided into low-budding (Bd1/Bd2) and high-budding (Bd3) groups. The tumor budding score was analyzed in relation to clinicopathological parameters, overall survival, and tumor-specific survival. The authors found that 115 (25.2 percent) cases had no tumor budding, 104 (22.8 percent) had low tumor budding, and 237 (52 percent) had high tumor budding.
Molecular Pathology Selected Abstracts
June 2020—The COVID-19 pandemic has focused the world’s attention on using sensitive high-throughput molecular diagnostic testing for the SARS-CoV-2 virus as a public health tool for “flattening the curve” of the infection. Although initial shortages of specialized polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing reagents that plagued the early weeks of the pandemic have slowly improved (as of CAP TODAY press time), an obstacle to universal testing continues to be the first-step bottleneck of collecting respiratory tract samples for virus-specific reverse transcriptase-PCR (RT-PCR) testing. The traditional gold standard sample for COVID-19 testing has been a nasopharyngeal (NP) swab. However, nationwide shortages of NP swabs, personal protective equipment (PPE), and viral transport media have intermittently delayed the testing process. In an attempt to alleviate these critical sample-collection issues and promote more widespread testing, the medical community and other entities have been investigating alternative sample-collection procedures.
Q&A column
Q. Are there high-specificity IHC stains for diagnosing mesothelioma that differ from those recommended in the “Guidelines for pathologic diagnosis of malignant mesothelioma: 2012 update of the consensus statement from the International Mesothelioma Interest Group”? Read answer.
Q. For our hospital tissue and blood committee, we would like to expand the tissue component to look at more preoperative versus postoperative diagnoses (acute appendicitis, for example) and anything else that should be evaluated, such as adequacy of tissue and blood samples. Is there a resource that provides a list of tissue-related quality metrics that we can evaluate?
Read answer.
Newsbytes
June 2020—The global market for health care chatbots has been growing at a fairly rapid pace in recent years, but “COVID-19 is the thing that’s going to make chatbots mainstream,” says Greg Kefer, chief marketing officer at the chatbot company LifeLink Health. A 2019 Allied Market Research report, released just months prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, projected the health care chatbot industry would reach $345.3 million by 2026, a steep rise from 2018, when it garnered $116.9 million (www.alliedmarketresearch.com/healthcare-chatbots-market). But now, the COVID-19 pandemic has put into sharp relief one of the key value propositions of chatbots—unlimited scale, which means the timeline for adoption “just got massively compressed,” says Kefer, whose software-as-a-service company develops enterprise-level chatbots for large health care organizations.
Put It on the Board
Better cancer diagnostics at core of Future of Pathology report
June 2020—Leica Biosystems launched in April The Future of Pathology Expert Report written by an international panel of pathologists in consultation with health care executives, cancer stakeholders, and pathology leaders. In the report, each member of the panel—Tiffany Graham, MD, and Jerad Gardner, MD, in the U.S., and Bethany Williams, MBBS, PhD, and Matthew Clarke, MBBS, in the U.K.—addresses one of four subjects: pathology education, digital pathology and artificial intelligence, improving perceptions of pathology, and molecular pathology. The theme of the report (available at www.thefutureofpathology.com) is improving and transforming cancer diagnostics.