Royal Philips, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, has acquired PathXL, Belfast, Northern Ireland. PathXL’s image analysis and tissue pathology software is expected to complement Philips’ digital pathology offerings and help expand the company’s leadership in the fast-growing field. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Russ Granzow, Royal Philips.

Russ Granzow, Royal Philips.

“With this acquisition, we are accelerating our drive to support global medical institutions in their transition to digitized pathology workflows,” says 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 enables pathologists to review and share large sets of clinical data using image analytics, with the aim of improving the quality of diagnoses. According to Philips, the field has the potential to enable new therapies and ultimately improve patient outcomes. Philips’ lntelliSite pathology system is an automated digital pathology image creation, management, and viewing system comprising an ultra-fast pathology slide scanner, an image management system, and dedicated software tools.

PathXL offers a line of digital pathology software applications to research and education segments of the pathology and biopharmaceutical markets. The company has approximately 30 employees, offices in the United Kingdom and United States, and distributors across three continents.

Philips’ IntelliSite system is CE marked for in vitro diagnostic use. In the United States, the Philips system is indicated for in vitro diagnostic use for manual reading of the digital HER2 application.

For more information, visit Royal Philips.