BioImagene CEO, Dr. Ajit Singh, Speaks On Enabling Personalized Medicine Through Digital Pathology
Dr. Ajit Singh, CEO of BioImagene, spoke on Wednesday on the importance of digital pathology in personalized medicine – a rapidly emerging field that promises to tailor diagnoses and therapies for individual patients based on their specific profiles at the California Society of Pathologists (CSP) Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, CA.
BioImagene's vision is that digital pathology will be a key enabler for personalized medicine, will aid clinicians in managing and interpreting data from a whole new set of diagnostic tests to select patients for specific therapies.
It should be noted that personalized medicine is expected to get a major push from the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama (see below post).
Personalized medicine involves identifying genetic, genomic, and clinical information that allows accurate predictions to be made about a person's susceptibility of developing disease, the course of disease, and its response to treatment
Dr. Singh said, “I came here today to talk to pathologists about necessary innovations in pathology that will impact the delivery of healthcare in the future.” He further added, “In the next decade, anatomic pathology is poised to undergo a fundamental shift from glass slides to digital images, from eyeball estimates to quantitative data, and from single marker assessment to multibiomarker analysis. This transformation will give a major push to personalized medicine. Digital pathology is one of the last missing links in this process.”
Dr. Mahul Amin, Chairman, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center also spoke at the meeting about the critical role of pathologists in the era of personalized medicine. “The traditional approach to treatment is generally reactive prescription and monitoring of the disease based on symptomatic diagnosis. Personalized healthcare incorporates molecular and genetic data of the patient and the disease to offer targeted therapy, genetic stratification and proactive intervention for early diagnosis or prevention of the disease. In contrast to the traditional approach of one size fits all treatment, personalized medicine offers the right treatment for the right person at the right time with the right dose for the right outcome and improved quality of life.
