A digital pathology company has raised $23 million in Series B funding as it seeks to push its cancer-detecting software into new markets.
Philadelphia-based Proscia has made inroads into the research and biopharma markets since the company was founded in 2014, said David West, Proscia’s CEO and a co-founder. The company is now looking to expand in the field of clinical diagnostics, where it expects a long run. Proscia employs 40 people but expects the number to double in the months ahead.
“It’s very much the beginning of digital pathology,” West said in a phone interview. “This is a decade-plus trend that is going to play out.”
Proscia’s software – called Concentriq – is essentially an operating system for digital scanners used in the analysis of tissue biopsies. It allows users to scan, store and analyze digital images and to launch companion apps developed by Proscia and by third parties. Proscia’s DermAI app, for example, can triage skin-tissue biopsies so that high-risk cases get attention.
The platform comes in two versions: Concentriq for Research and Concentriq Dx for clinical users.
Contentriq’s customers include the Joint Pathology Center, a U.S. government reference center that is using the Proscia platform to digitize its archive of roughly 55 million glass slides. Proscia also is partnering with University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands to drive the use of computational pathology in clinical practice.
Other players in digital pathology include Deep Lens, Paige and PathAI, which raised $75 million last year from Bristol-Myers Squib and a Merck innovation fund.
The companies generally are not looking to replace pathologists. Rather, they see digital technologies as improving efficiency, particularly as the number of pathologists declines. The pathologist population in the U.S. fell 17.53% between 2007 and 2017, according to a study last year in JAMA Network Open, the open-access journal of the American Medical Association.
Proscia’s Series B round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Hitachi Ventures. Total funding for the company to date stands at $35 million. Previous investors include Flybridge Capital Partners, Fusion Fund and Robin Hood Ventures.
“Proscia is a high-growth company with a unique platform-plus-AI approach that is enabling it to capitalize on a multi-billion-dollar market opportunity,” Alexander Niehenke, a Scale Venture partner, said in a statement. We’re excited to be a part of Proscia’s success as it expands its leadership position in pathology’s shift from analog to digital.”
The company’s path forward includes strengthening the regulatory position for Concentriq.
The platform is cleared for diagnostic use in Europe and other countries under a CE Mark. But in the U.S., the platform is cleared for diagnosis only under an emergency use authorization issued in April by the Food and Drug Administration, West said. The company hopes eventually to obtain regular clearance since the EUA expires six months after the end of the Covid-19 public-health emergency. Researchers and pharma companies don’t need regulatory clearance to use Concentriq’s research version.
Proscia also plans to use investment proceeds to develop more apps to assist in scanning images and triaging cases. Future apps might work as companion diagnostics, just as liquid biopsies are working today.
The two approaches can be complementary, West added. “As part of a quantitative and data-driven diagnostic process, you’ll see a convergence of different diagnostic technologies.”
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