Summary:
Often, the first step in important discoveries related to the diagnosis and treatment of cancer begins in the research laboratory. With the complex needs of personalized medicine, in-vitro and animal research provide key proteomic, molecular and genetic understandings of tumor biology that can then be translated to human research studies.
A world-renowned cancer center strives to eliminate cancer through cutting edge programs, integrating research, patient care and prevention, thus providing a holistic approach to beating cancer.

The same challenges relating to workload, collaboration, and standardization of biomarker analysis often seen in clinical laboratories also arise in research laboratories. An animal research laboratory at the cancer center sought a digital pathology solution to easily quantify tumors, collaborate quickly, and decrease discovery times. The primary goal was to achieve quantitative results and standardize across thousands of slides. Furthermore, they sought an image library for use by local veterinary students. An Aperio ePathology system was implemented in order to achieve these results. High quality digital images from the Aperio scanner provided researchers the ability to use automated quantitative analysis and increase analysis speed from on average 30 minutes to mere seconds per slide. Moreover, Aperio image analysis tools provided standardization, accuracy and reproducibility by eliminating inter- and intra-observer variability, inherent with manual tissue-based biomarker analysis. With the ability to share images, collaborations were performed quickly and efficiencies in labor related to slide logistics were recognized. Overall economic savings related to time, labor and associated slide logistics were estimated to be 30-40%. Furthermore, an easy-to-use, standardized image library of reference slides was also developed for the veterinary students.
