Helping bring products to market faster

Lorne Davies explains the importance of digital imaging in research.

Pharmaceutical and biotechnology laboratories are under increasing pressure to help bring drugs and healthcare treatments to market faster. But the process of isolating and testing lead candidates is fraught with difficulty. Digital pathology and virtual microscopy are valuable during every key step of the discovery process and are being adapted more and more by companies doing pharma and biotech research.

The first research area that can be streamlined using virtual microscopy is the examination of hundreds or thousands of animal slides that are generated for each study. Until recently, a pathologist or other clinical professional prepared each slide, put it on a microscope, decided which area to review first, looked into the eyepieces, counted cells or made other observations, and finally, recorded the findings in a spreadsheet, analysis tool or LIS system. The user then moved to the next area of the slide (or next magnification) and repeated the sequence. This process was repeated with each animal, slide and region.

Today, using new virtual microscopy tools like the Olympus VS110 slide scanning system, glass slides are delivered to a technician who scans them once. Numerous pathologists can review the slides simultaneously, each at various magnifications, with automatic logging of batch, animal, slide, location, magnification and other metadata, along with each reviewer's findings. The slides are instantly accessible, so instead of delivering boxes of slides first to one pathologist and then to another, any number of pathologists anywhere in the world can be called upon to review them, vastly increasing the potential for rapid and expert review and analysis.

Adding the capacity for parallel review to the workflow has saved some companies enough time to allow for additional pathology reviews. Furthermore, since original glass slides are not passed around, they can be archived, while accurate, clear digital images are available for future research without the risk of breakage or loss. Each pathologist's review is also streamlined. Onscreen whole slide review using multiple magnifications and areas of the sample allows for greater speed, less risk of error, enhanced data archiving and retrieval, fewer ergonomic issues, and access to expert pathologists wherever they are located.

Virtual microscopy offers additional benefits beyond the laboratory. For instance, it offers the company the potential to more easily deepen and draw on the knowledge they have amassed about the compounds or treatments they are considering. They can now go back to review a molecule or a whole class of molecules, using the database to relate their findings to other studies. In addition, digital imaging and review allow both qualitative and quantitative analysis.  Image analysis, for instance, adds data points to help minimize subjectivity and reduce the number of independent analyses needed to arrive at an end result. Whole slide stereology is a technique that allows the rigorous quantification of lung alveoli, brain neurons or other features as part of the research process. Both image analysis and stereology provide more than data endpoints; they also can help save valuable time in the research process. At the Osteoarthritis Research Society International (OARSI) meeting in Chicago in 2004, one major international pharmaceutical company reported that it took 15-30 minutes to annotate each image using traditional microscopy tools, but with the virtual microscopy system, they were able to shorten review time to under 30 seconds per image, giving the company a remarkable 30-60x time saving over the older method. Automated data management tools also help reduce repetitive and manual processes, even as they increase data traceability. 

Virtual microscopy and digital pathology are helping today's pharma and biotech companies bring new products to market with greater speed, enhanced connectivity, stronger validation based on scientific principals, improved quantification and increased traceability. The next frontier in digital imaging in the field may be the development of multimodal systems that will deliver brightfield, fluorescence, darkfield, differential interference contrast (DIC) and more in an integrated package.

Lorne D. Davies is Group Manager, Strategy and Product Management, Clinical Digital Imaging, Olympus America Inc. He is responsible for virtual microscopy research and planning throughout the US and Canada. A veteran of two decades in the microscopy, pharmaceutical and scientific instrumentation fields, he has been with Olympus since 1998.