Following a successful year-long pilot with a subset of our biopharma and biotech partners, today we announced that life sciences organizations can now leverage Proscia’s real-world data offering on the Concentriq® platform to accelerate precision medicine drug discovery and development. The enthusiasm with which our partners have engaged with this data has inspired us to share the vision and rationale behind bringing this impactful solution to life.
We all know someone who has faced cancer or another life-threatening disease. In many fortunate cases, early detection or a timely, targeted treatment has made all the difference. Of course, these life-saving interventions are not just strokes of luck; they are the result of insights gained from healthcare data, including real-world data (RWD) collected during routine clinical care.
Over the past decade, life sciences organizations have increasingly relied on RWD to help reduce the staggering $2.6 billion and 10-15 years typically required to bring a new medicine to market. Unlike controlled clinical trials, which capture data from only 5% of the population, RWD provides a broader, more inclusive view of patients across diverse groups. This comprehensive information enables life sciences companies to make informed portfolio decisions, shorten clinical trial timelines, optimize patient recruitment, identify new indications for existing treatments, and much more. McKinsey estimates that an average top-20 pharmaceutical company could unlock more than $300 million a year by leveraging RWD.
This potential is driving investments in data-driven strategies, powered by AI solutions that extract valuable insights from the growing volumes of data, ushering in a new era of drug development where every stage of R&D becomes more intelligent and efficient. Proscia is at the forefront of this transformation by enabling life sciences organizations to unlock the untapped potential of multimodal pathology RWD to gain critical insights that accelerate the development of innovative diagnostics and therapies. In this blog, we’ll explore how leveraging pathology data in combination with other modalities is advancing the future of precision medicine and how Proscia’s RWD offering is driving this progress.
Digital pathology: unlocking a new dimension of real-world data
In recent years, the data fueling life sciences R&D has evolved from reliance on single sources—such as claims, electronic health records (EHRs), and molecular data—to a more comprehensive “multimodal” approach that combines and harmonizes multiple data types. This shift is particularly significant given drug development’s increased focus on precision medicine approaches, which require a deep, nuanced understanding of human biology to precisely target the pathways driving disease. Robust, multimodal RWD is critical to this approach.
While drug developers have benefited from multimodal RWD for several years now, a critical component has been missing: pathology data. This data includes whole slide images—high-resolution virtual slides, created by digitizing tissue biopsies—which contain billions of pixels, providing one of the most direct and detailed views of diseases like cancer. Until recently, these images were not routinely generated in clinical workflows; however, the rapid adoption of digital pathology is now generating a wealth of untapped data, creating a new data modality from which life sciences can extract valuable insights. While other data types offer important clues about what might be happening in the body, pathology data uniquely shows how a disease affects the body at the cellular and histological level, making it indispensable to fully understand biological outcomes such as disease progression and treatment effectiveness, particularly in precision therapies that require selective binding to specific cells and tissues expressing certain proteins.
Even at a small scale, multimodal datasets that include pathology whole slide images have demonstrated their ability to enhance drug discovery and development, from driving early discovery and exploratory research to stratifying clinical trial patients and helping assess trial endpoints. Looking forward, these datasets could enable AI-driven biomarkers and companion diagnostics that identify treatment-predictive biomarkers directly from pathology images, ensuring that next-generation therapies, such as antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), are matched to the patients who will benefit most.
Proscia’s role in harnessing pathology real-world data for precision medicine
At Proscia, we believe that incorporating pathology images into multimodal data will be transformative for precision medicine drug discovery and development. We are committed to providing this data in high-value format at scale, coupled with tools that make it not only accessible, but also actionable, helping life sciences organizations accelerate the development of next-generation diagnostics and therapies.
To this end, we have built one of the most comprehensive repositories of de-identified whole slide images matched with associated clinical and genomic data, and have conducted a year-long pilot, bringing this data to a subset of our life sciences partners to demonstrate its impact in practice. What we’ve experienced over the past year has only strengthened our confidence in the power of multimodal data incorporating pathology images.
Today, we are excited to announce that our real-world data offering is now available on the Concentriq platform. Life sciences organizations can leverage Proscia’s multimodal, targeted, structured RWD to drive critical milestones in developing innovative therapies and diagnostics.
Proscia’s new offering includes cohorts across various therapeutic areas, curated from our continuously growing repository of over 10 million whole slide images across 2 million unique patients. These cohorts are richly characterized with structured data from molecular tests, pathology reports, laboratory tests, next generation sequencing, and image metadata, providing deep insights and maximizing data value. Proscia’s data is tailored to meet diverse research requirements aligned with drug development pipelines and is delivered directly into the Concentriq enterprise pathology platform, where it can be quickly leveraged in R&D workflows, revealing insights that accelerate the path to critical milestones.
Key elements to unlocking the value of pathology real-world data
While it’s clear that pathology whole slide image data is highly valuable, not all data is created equal. To fully realize its potential for precision medicine R&D, the data must meet specific criteria to ensure its effectiveness. We developed Proscia’s RWD offering with the following key tenets in mind, and their impact was validated through our year-long pilot with life sciences partners.
Combination of Diverse Data Modalities
No single data type can answer all the questions needed to develop precision medicines; rich, multi-dimensional data is required for scientists and AI to unlock deep insights. For instance, we provided a top pharmaceutical company with a disease-specific dataset that included pathology whole slide images linked to genomic profiles from next-generation sequencing tests. This comprehensive data helped the company develop an AI algorithm to pre-screen patients for a known biomarker by identifying patterns within the images, predicting a lung cancer patient’s response to a clinical trial treatment. This information is crucial for determining trial eligibility and optimizing patient outcomes. By combining multiple data types, scientists can gain a more holistic understanding of disease mechanisms, leading to more targeted and effective therapeutic strategies.
Alignment with Therapeutic Development Needs
While the increased adoption of digital pathology in the clinical setting is expanding access to RWD, many life sciences organizations still struggle to obtain disease-specific cohorts that align with their precision medicine programs at the scale required to meet analytical aims. Proscia’s extensive repository, which grows by 10,000 whole slide images daily, has the breadth and depth needed to generate targeted datasets of diverse patients with sufficient size and representativeness to meet R&D requirements.
Structured Data that’s Research- and AI-Ready
High-quality, structured data is essential for generating meaningful, consistent, and reliable insights. This is particularly important when building AI models and algorithms for R&D workflows, which are only as good as the quality of the data used to create them. Proscia’s RWD is meticulously prepared to meet stringent quality standards. Every image undergoes screening by our Automated Quality Control (QC) AI application, and complex unstructured data types, such as histopathology reports, are cleaned and normalized for immediate use with AI and machine learning methods.
Platform for Rapid Insights
Beyond merely accessing data, life sciences companies need a modern, FAIR approach to managing and engaging with their data within and across teams. The Concentriq platform supports enterprise pathology workflows from biomarker discovery to clinical trial execution, generating a continuously growing, enriched data foundation for scientists to drive insights and AI innovation. By integrating Proscia’s RWD into this environment, scientists can quickly utilize the data in workflows specifically designed to support key use cases across the R&D lifecycle, leverage insights from Proscia’s precision medicine AI portfolio, and develop proprietary models using the platform’s developer tools. This approach accelerates time to insight and facilitates data sharing across teams, enabling faster, more informed decision-making across the R&D organization.
A vision for a healthier future
We envision a future where “precision medicine” is simply “medicine,” where almost every diagnostic and therapy is precisely tailored to an individual patient’s biology. Achieving this vision requires considering not only clinical outcomes and genetics but also cellular processes and other complex mechanisms that only pathology can reveal. Fortunately, the digital revolution in pathology is generating this valuable data every day. When combined with other data types and analyzed by computational scientists and AI, it holds the key to unlocking the full potential of precision medicine. At Proscia, we are committed to ensuring this data is enriched, accessible, and ready for analysis by the brightest minds in drug discovery and development with the shared goal of bringing life-saving therapies to patients sooner. We hope you’ll join us.
To learn more about how multimodal RWD incorporating pathology whole slide images is transforming precision medicine, join our upcoming webinar.
Ross Cantor, MT(ASCP) is the Vice President, Data Strategy & Partnerships at Proscia
