CAP TODAY Pathology/Laboratory Medicine/Laboratory Management
Next month: Dr. David Rimm on assay performance versus protein measurement and more
“The last reason for doing multiplex staining is that when we look at, for example, a lung cancer ‘stained’ for PD-L1, and we’re asked to say what percentage of cancer cells are positive, I believe that task is almost impossible visually. There are just too many cells present. Even though we’ve managed to become reasonably good at estimating it, we’re never going to be very good at it.”
Dr. Taylor believes laboratories will need some sort of iPhone or Android apps, or digital assistance on their computers. “So when the digital image [of the IHC assay] comes up there, we can click that we want to do scoring, or we want to do intensity comparison, etc., and we’ll be able to click on the app and detect the various markers that we want just by picking the right application, as it were. Potentially this approach will provide a pre-analysis of whatever we want, and a ‘pre-score’ that we can then check visually to make sure it scored the right cells.”
However we do all of this, do it we must, Dr. Taylor says. “Personalized medicine is here. And it’s going to require personalized pathology.”
[hr]Anne Paxton is a writer in Seattle.