Philips expands its Digital Pathology Solutions portfolio with the acquisition of PathXL

Royal Philips announced that it has acquired PathXL, a Northern Ireland-based leader in digital pathology image analysis, workflow software and educational tools. PathXL’s image analysis and tissue pathology software will complement Philips’ Digital Pathology Solutions offering, and help expand the business’ leadership in this fast-growing field. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Pathology involves the examination of patient tissue samples and plays a crucial role in the diagnosis and treatment of a wide variety of diseases, including cancer. Philips is a pioneer and leader in the digitization of pathology, a fast-growing area in healthcare as pathology labs are under pressure to improve throughput and efficiency, enhance quality and to deliver new diagnostic tests for precision medicine.

“With this acquisition, we are accelerating our drive to support global medical institutions in their transition to digitized pathology workflows,” said Russ Granzow, General Manager of Philips Digital Pathology Solutions. “Together with PathXL we see a unique opportunity to amplify our combined technology leadership positions. We will be able to offer an intelligent and integrated solution that fulfills many needs in computational pathology, education, workflow solutions and image analytics. These important and growing disciplines within pathology will enable a high-quality quantitative analysis of digital whole slide images.”

Digital pathology will enable pathologists to review and share large sets of clinical data using image analytics with the aim to help improve the quality of diagnosis and has the potential to enable new therapies and ultimately improve patient outcomes. Philips’ lntelliSite Pathology Solution* is an automated digital pathology image creation, management and viewing system comprised of an ultra-fast pathology slide scanner, an image management system and dedicated software tools.

PathXL, founded in 2004 and headquartered in Belfast, Northern Ireland, offers a range of digital pathology software applications to research and education segments of pathology and bio-pharma markets. The company has approximately 30 employees, offices in the UK and USA and distributors across three continents.

A press release can be found from Philips website.