Today we announced a new edition of Concentriq, our flagship digital pathology platform. The new Concentriq Commercial Research Edition includes purpose-built features and enterprise scalability designed specifically for life sciences. While the core platform, including the backbone infrastructure, collaboration, and viewing, remain the same, this new edition takes digital pathology to the next level for the pharmas, biotechs, and CROs looking to streamline the use of pathology data in their research, discovery, and clinical trials.
Why did we build this edition, what does it include, and how exactly does it empower life sciences organizations? Read on to find out.
Why did we build the Concentriq Commercial Research Edition?
Life sciences organizations have been on the forefront of digital pathology adoption in an effort to better assimilate data from multiple sources and leverage the hidden data trapped in physical glass slides; yet, when we speak with researchers, directors, and IT personnel, it’s clear that they’ve had big challenges in scaling digital pathology practices throughout their organizations. Here are some of the pain points we hear almost uniformly across pharmas, biotechs, and CROs:
- It’s extra work: The concept of digitization is great, but the logistics of getting all of my data digitized means hiring new staff to manage the labor-intensive parts of image upload and data entry.
- My R&D portfolio has a lot of stakeholders and is complex: My organization has dozens, if not hundreds, of constituent groups, clients, and programs. My digital system currently doesn’t map well to that, which creates a huge administrative challenge in both the daily management and expansion of a digital pathology platform.
- Balancing accessibility and security is challenging: There’s a constraining balance between accessibility and security. I need to make it easy for users to share programs and studies with their collaborators or clients while ensuring that my organization’s data remains secure and private.
- It’s hard to scale: While I see digital pathology as valuable, it’s unscalable with my current IT infrastructure. I’d need more servers and more IT personnel to really grow my digital pathology deployment to full capacity.
It’s too separate from the rest of my pathology: I already have other data management systems, analysis software, and third party applications that my pathologists use on a day-to-day basis. This adds another layer of complexity to an already busy ecosystem of pathology-related software.
While there is plethora of more specific concerns about the expanded use of digital pathology at life science organizations, one thing is clear: what’s been available to date simply isn’t allowing these organizations to fully leverage their pathology data. And hence, the Concentriq Commercial Research Edition was born to help these organizations realize the true promise of digitization.
What’s included in this new release?
The Concentriq platform already contains powerful core functionality, including real-time and asynchronous collaboration, a robust image viewing and annotation toolkit, and biomarker-specific image analysis. This new edition builds off of the existing platform to offer new and exciting features designed specifically for the life sciences. Here are some highlights:
Expanded integration
Automated synchronization and seamless interoperability with leading scanners, laboratory information systems (LIS), clinical trials management systems, and image analysis solutions ensure up-to-date pathology data is always available across the laboratory’s technology ecosystem.
Automated metadata import
No more slow, error-prone manual data entry. Automated metadata association from LIS and drag-and-drop metadata association from spreadsheets allow for faster initiation of new studies and experiments
Hierarchical image and data management
Configurable repositories and folders map to an organization’s programs, studies, and experiments for intuitive data organization, creating robust workflows that drive efficient trials and studies. Repositories can be grouped by client or department with shared, editable roles and permission sets as well as favorited for quick access. Program or study-level managers can quickly set up their own data organization schemas and share them with internal and external partners and clients through a single repository card.
Split-screen image viewing
Pathologists and scientists can view multiple images in different panes of the same window and navigate them in unison to quickly detect co-localized biomarkers.
Tissue Microarray (TMA) management
Concentriq’s new TMA module automatically segments whole TMA images into individual core images. Users can add, edit, zoom, and delete regions of interest as needed. They can also associate metadata with the whole TMA image or with each segmented core image within the image viewer.
Fluorescent image support
Now supporting fluorescent images, Concentriq allows users to view fluorescent images, in addition to brightfield images, in a single platform for simpler, more intuitive organization. Users can view single or multiple stain channels and configure channel marker colors.
Robust, intuitive search
Global search across an organization’s data is a must-have for life science companies with hundreds of thousands of whole-slide images and associated metadata. The enhanced search functionality included in this edition make it easy to perform both free-text and multi-attribute field-based search within or among programs and studies.
How does this new release solve big problems for digital pathology in the life sciences?
Boiling it down, the challenges we’ve seen life sciences organizations confront center around how digital pathology can be scaled and managed effectively to operate at a more impactful level throughout the company. The Concentriq Commercial Research Edition is designed to accommodate those needs in the following ways:
A focus on automation: Whether through built-in scanner synchronization, automated mass data import, data migration services, automated TMA de-array, or any of the other intuitive and powerful functionality built into this edition, the Commercial Research Edition is saving time spent on mundane, repetitive, and error-prone manual tasks. This enables large enterprises to scale up the use of digital without stressing existing staffing resources.
Ensuring accessibility: Global search; granular user-defined, program-level roles and permissions; and expanded integration with clinical trial management systems, LIS, and other laboratory hardware and software are all part of an effort to make sure that your whole-slide image and associated data are available from anywhere, in any system, for the right people. While digital pathology is valuable in isolation, the power of the data generated through whole-slide imaging is magnified when it can be meaningfully incorporated with the rest of an R&D operation.
Scale-up made easy: For labs already operating with some component of digital pathology, scale-up has been a big challenge. The Concentriq Commercial Research Edition offers an intuitive hierarchical image and data management framework that can be controlled by program or study administrators. It can also be implemented on a flexible infrastructure that offers award winning cloud, on-premises, and hybrid deployments for an immediately scalable, low-cost, low-impact launchpad for rapid digital pathology growth. This minimizes administrative and IT headaches.
Digital pathology offers tremendous promise for pharmas, biotechs, and CROs to fully integrate pathology data into their research efforts and ultimately deliver higher quality results. That’s why these organizations have historically been some of the earliest and fastest adopters of whole-slide imaging. This new release helps these organizations grow and scale digital pathology, creating a robust and data-rich pathology research and development pipeline to fuel new insights and accelerate discovery.
For more information on the Concentriq Commercial Research Edition, I encourage you to contact us to arrange a demo or check out the below resources:
Overview: Proscia Concentriq Digital Pathology Platform
