Shortly after garnering a European green light for its digital pathology platform, the software developer Proscia has posted a $37 million venture capital round to help expand its commercial reach and seek additional product approvals.
The company previously collected $23 million in a late 2020 series B cycle. Its Concentriq Dx platform for analyzing tissue slides aims to bring together Proscia’s in-house portfolio of artificial intelligence tools, as well as plug-and-play offerings from third-party software developers, and combine them in one workflow to help clinicians check patient samples for diseases such as cancer.
Earlier this year, the Philadelphia-based Proscia signed up with Siemens Healthineers to have the medtech company distribute the Concentriq Dx platform through its enterprise imaging division. The agreement marked Siemens’ entry into the digital pathology market, amid rising biopsy volumes and an industry-wide shift to remote work following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The traditional practice of pathology is on the verge of the biggest transformation the field has seen since the introduction of light microscopy, and we’re excited to accelerate pathology’s digital transformation and pioneer breakthroughs with a strong partner complementing our core strength in enterprise reading and reporting resulting in higher efficiency and improved patient outcomes,” Siemens’ head of imaging software and IT, Christian Zapf, said in a statement this past March.
Proscia’s series C round more than doubled the company’s lifetime fundraising amount, pushing its total to $72 million. It was backed by Highline Capital Management, Triangle Peak Partners, Alpha Intelligence Capital, Scale Venture Partners, Hitachi Ventures, ROBO Global, Emerald Development Managers and Razor's Edge Ventures.
“Pathology deserves the same revolutionary technology that has transformed the rest of medicine and our lives,” said Proscia CEO David West. The company estimates that as many as 1 billion slides will be digitized annually, as the number of cancer cases is expected to rise by about half by the year 2040.
Last month, Proscia introduced AI-powered quality control tools designed for drug development work to help reduce the amount of manual review necessary to check slide images for issues such as trapped air bubbles or blurriness.
Before that, the company released clinical trial data late last year for its DermAI application for diagnosing cancerous skin diseases. A prospective study of over 12,700 images showed the program identified cases of invasive melanoma and melanoma in situ with a sensitivity of 93% and a specificity of 91%. The program has not yet been cleared by the FDA and is available for research use only.
According to Proscia, the company’s user base includes 10 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies as well as the U.S. government’s Joint Pathology Center, which selected Concentriq to digitize its human tissue repository of over 55 million slides.
Concentriq Dx first received a CE mark in Europe in 2019; earlier this month it received a new approval under the EU’s in vitro diagnostic regulation for use in primary diagnosis.
The company said that rising demand for diagnostic services has driven it to establish subsidiaries in Ireland and Spain. Though not yet cleared in the U.S., Concentriq Dx is available for primary diagnosis under the FDA’s relaxed regulations for remote tools under the COVID-19 pandemic.