Hospitex is a global supplier of laboratory instruments for cytology. Can you introduce the company and the role it plays in the in-vitro diagnostics (IVD) market?

Hospitex is a 50-years old leader in cytological diagnostics based in Florence. The areas of Tuscany and Lombardy, but also Rome and the Pomezia municipality, offer a prolific academic and industrial environment for IVD. Florence has historically been very prominent in precision mechanics and optics.

Cancer diagnostics, split evenly between cytology and histology, is a US$20 million business. We verticalized our business and became specialized in cytology, the more complex, advanced, and multi-disciplinary field where we can exercise strong competitive advantages. For this reason, we have few competitors, and none of them have verticalized their business as we did. Moreover, in Italy, we benefit from strong engineering and medical competencies at a lower cost.

What is the value proposition of Hospitex for different markets?

Digital pathology has two dynamics: In developing countries, experts expect a tsunami caused by a shortage of pathologists. In the next five years, the number of practicing pathologists will halve. Today, 80% of practicing pathologists globally are over 55 years of age, while every year we see fewer newly qualified pathologists. The gap caused by these two factors combined is considered to be one of the biggest issues medicine problems today.  Already, 12 countries, many of which are African, have no active pathologists. In such markets, digital pathology enabled by AI can be used to make a diagnostic report remotely.

In developed countries like the US, the human resource is not as big of a problem, but the time of response can be very long in traditional cytology – which is perceived by the public to be very slow. For instance, the average waiting time to get the results of a Pap test used in cervical screenings is 21 days – too much for a woman with a high-risk genotype. Our technology has an efficiency factor of 10 times higher than the conventional method and we can return the results within 24 hours.

In Italy, our offer to the public sector is to act as a platform to collect and preserve the knowledge of professors and experts who will leave the field so that it can be passed down to new generations. In the private sector, we are launching a new service in Rome to help private labs offer a faster and better service to their patients.

Can you explain in more detail what makes your digital pathology solutions different?

Many people misunderstand digital pathology as any technology making a slide digital, which is an incorrect assumption. Digital pathology brings together digitalization and software that can make an interpretation of the slide.

Our technology can be broken down into two inter-related components – the hardware and the software. First, we use digitalization to create a standard on the slide. Using optical reading for each sample, we ensure that the result on the slide is always homogenous and standardized, no matter where in the world the sample was collected. If a doctor collects a high-density cell sample, while another takes a sample with fewer cells, we standardize the results and use an algorithm that recognizes 100% of the cellular fields to create the perfect substrates for reading under a digital microscope. This is the hardware of our technology. In addition to this, we use software to recognize and classify every cellular field. We can therefore make a diagnostic report faster and remotely, the software giving suggestions to the doctor on the type of cells to look at.

What are your main objectives in the medium-term?

Hospitex wants to establish a digital pathology system in the different scenarios of application earlier explained (public/private, low-income/high-income countries), and, more specifically, to deploy our technology in 250 labs by 2023. Down the line, we’ll be launching our own lab, Hospitex Certified Laboratory in different pilot markets, which will offer analysis services to other players, with a strategic focus on public institutions and NGOs. As of now, we have two pipeline projects in Tanzania and Togo, and we would like to advance these and replicate the business model in other countries.