SXSW Startups: Pathware
The Forrest Four-Cast: February 9, 2019
Fifty diverse startups will aim to impress a panel of judges and a live audience with their skills, creativity and innovation at SXSW Pitch Presented by Cyndx. Winners in 10 categories will be announced at the Pitch Award Ceremony at 6:30 pm Sunday, March 10, at the Hilton Austin.
A finalist in the Health and Wearable category, which will pitch at 5 pm Sunday, March 10, Pathware is creating hardware and software solutions to simplify the digital pathology workflow. Their whole slide imaging and cloud-based management system, Bioptic, rapidly returns a biopsy quality determination to verify that a viable sample was collected with over 96% certainty.
What is your competitive advantage?
Speed, accuracy and cost. With Bioptic, an assessment is available in under two minutes, granting massive time savings over alternate methods including manual assessment. This is in addition to our accuracy of 99.2% for assessment quality, a percentage significantly higher than the industry standard. Along with both of these, the Bioptic unit will be much cheaper to operate than any of the currently available methods, at only $10 per slide scanned.
What are your goals for Pathware in 2019?
We have clinical trials beginning at four hospitals this summer followed quickly by our full product launch in the fall of this year.
Tell us about how your transformative software works.
Our software identifies tissue characteristics and the quantity of the cells collected to verify that the biopsy successfully extracted enough of a sample to yield a diagnosis. Since this is done under two minutes, if the tissue sample is inadequate, the clinician can perform another biopsy before the patient leaves.
How does your software sharpen the accuracy of sample detection for pathologists?
Before the patient’s discharge, the quality of a sample can be determined using Bioptic™. Once the unstained slide is within the unit, a whole slide image is taken, algorithmically assessed, and sent to the cloud. This workflow provides an accurate quality assessment in less than two minutes. This sample-specific quality review verifies the adequacy of any given biopsy with 96% certainty, matching the accuracy of a pathologist’s manual interpretation at a lower personnel cost.
One in five needle biopsies fail to collect a proper sample. How will Pathware change this?
By verifying the quality of a biopsy sample at the time of sample taking, our Bioptic unit will give far more advanced notice on whether or not a sample is sufficient for a test. In this situation, a sample can be retaken immediately instead of having the patient make another visit at a later time, saving both time and money for both parties.
Tell us a little about your business model.
Our model will initially operate on two revenue streams. Initial sales of our Bioptic units to medical institutions and billing to use our assessment service at $10 per slide. Hospitals can expect an average reimbursement of $69.21 per pass, with an average of 4.5 passes per biopsy.
What other medical prospects does Pathware have sights set on
Assessment of thyroid tissues of our first target market, but we are capable of expanding into lung, pancreas, breast, lymph nodes and GI. Additionally, Bioptic has the potential to be used to support the assessment of urine samples, pap smear samples and bacterial analysis. We plan to expand the biopsies that the Bioptic unit can verify through free software upgrade packages after the initial launch of the thyroid unit.
Pathware is currently based in Ann Arbor, Mich. Tell us about the startup ecosystem there.
Ann Arbor is the home to the University of Michigan where biomedical research projects get pushed out as startups. Investors flock to the area as well as entrepreneurs. This makes for a very healthcare and biotechnology-driven ecosystem. We all go to the same entrepreneur events, know each other by name, and find that people within the ecosystem tend to be supportive and enjoy mentoring budding startups. It’s nice to know we can reach out to mentors when we hit a bump.
If your team members weren’t involved in building Pathware, what would they be doing?
Jeeping along the Pacific coast, running a cupcake business, coding for NASA, going to medical school, developing another healthcare startup, teaching and performing business analyses for budding startups.
Looking at the entire tech industry, what trend is your team most excited about?
Grocery delivery with ordering done through an app or online is a burgeoning market that is always exciting to take a glance at. With all the new partnerships, (Shipt and Target, Amazon and Whole Foods, etc.) it’s looking like the landscape will only become more competitive moving forward.
What technology would you call the Myspace of 2019…in other words, something we won’t be thinking so much about in 2020 and beyond?Snapchat. With so many other platforms adopting what made the app popular, they’ll be hard-pressed to carve out a niche in the coming year.
What advice do you have for others wanting to join the startup journey?There are no shortcuts when founding a company. Every step of the way is an immense effort, and every step of the way is worth that effort. Long days and sleepless nights spent on a passion project taking shape and becoming a physical product you can be proud of that will make a difference. Take your time decision-making and consider every input.
What has the startup experience taught you about life?
You get out what you put in.
Look for more interviews with other SXSW Pitch finalists in this space between now and March.
Click here to see all 50 finalists for SXSW Pitch 2019, along with the links to their interviews on Medium.
Also, if you are an entrepreneur, check out all the cool panels and presentations in the Entrepreneurship and Startups Track, which runs March 8–12 at SXSW.
Hugh Forrest serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, the world’s most unique gathering of creative professionals. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often cover tech-related trends; other times they focus on books, pop culture, sports and other current events.
