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, October 20, 2026, 11 AM-12 PM ET
Hear experts review the biological and clinical significance of the HER2 expression continuum in breast tissue, providing a clearer understanding of how these variations might impact diagnosis, and discuss the emerging importance of documenting HER2-low and HER2-ultralow categories using a validated IHC assay.
Webinar presenters Keith Wharton, MD, PhD, Global Medical Affairs Leader–Pathology, Roche Diagnostics Solutions, and Hannah Y. Wen, MD, PhD, Director, Breast Pathology Fellowship, Associate Team Leader, Breast Pathology Team, Attending Pathologist, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
CAP TODAY does not endorse any of the products or services named within. The webinar is made possible by a special educational grant from Roche.
Moderated by: Bob McGonnagle, Publisher, CAP TODAY
Thursday, October 29, 2026, 1 PM-2 PM ET
Hear an expert discuss the evolving role of PD-L1 testing in HNSCC and ovarian cancer.
Webinar presenter Georgios Deftereos, MD, Professor of Pathology, Associate Director of the Clinical Cancer Genomics Laboratory, Director of Molecular Cytopathology, University of California, San Francisco
CAP TODAY does not endorse any of the products or services named within. The webinar is made possible by a special educational grant from Agilent.
Moderated by: Bob McGonnagle, Publisher, CAP TODAY
Tuesday, November 3, 2026, 1 PM-2 PM ET
Hear an expert discuss the challenges of detecting NRG1 fusions and how RNA-based testing can support more comprehensive fusion identification in clinical practice.
Webinar presenter Benjamin Weinberg, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Attending Physician
specializing in gastrointestinal medical oncology
CAP TODAY does not endorse any of the products or services named within. The webinar is made possible by a special educational grant from Diaceutics.
Moderated by: Bob McGonnagle, Publisher, CAP TODAY
Tuesday, November 10, 2026, 1 PM-2 PM ET
Join us for a session to help improve diagnostic accuracy in your practice when scoring HER2 IHC 0 with faint, incomplete membrane staining in ≤10% of tumor cells vs IHC 0 with no membrane staining detected in patients with mBC.
Webinar presenter Jeffrey Gregg, MD, University of Nevada
CAP TODAY does not endorse any of the products or services named within. This program is being sponsored by Daiichi Sankyo, Inc. and AstraZeneca. The speaker is being compensated for the presentation. The program is not CME accredited and may not be used for CME accreditation.
Moderated by: Bob McGonnagle, Publisher, CAP TODAY
Monday, November 16, 2026, 12:30 PM-2 PM ET
Hear experts discuss a multidisciplinary approach to oncopathology for HER2
assessments for solid tumors in the absence of a companion diagnostic.
Webinar presenters Funda Meric-Bernstam, MD, Chair, Department of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics Medical Director, Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, and Emina E. Torlakovic, MD, PhD, College of Medicine, University of Saskatchewan, Canadian Biomarker Quality Assurance, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, and Carol Cheung, MD, PhD, JD, FRCPC, Deputy Director, Canadian Biomarker Quality, Assurance—Programme canadien d’assurance de la qualité des biomarqueurs
CAP TODAY does not endorse any of the products or services named within. This program is being sponsored by Daiichi Sankyo, Inc. and AstraZeneca. The speaker is being compensated for the presentation. The program is not CME accredited and may not be used for CME accreditation.
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.