The Story of PathologyWatch: Building the Future of Digital Cancer Diagnostics

Sometimes the biggest opportunities in healthcare aren’t in creating new treatments, but in modernizing outdated processes that doctors use every day. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, PathologyWatch CEO Daniel Lambert shared how his third venture-backed startup is transforming cancer diagnostics by bringing pathology into the digital age.

Spotting a 25-Year-Old Process Ready for Disruption

The spark for PathologyWatch came from observing an archaic process that hadn’t changed in decades. As Daniel explains, “If you ever go into a doctor to get a biopsy, what’s typically done is that tissue is sent out to a lab, like quest or labcore or one of the really big labs, and there they do some tissue. A pathologist looks at it under a microscope, makes a best guess as to what that cancer is, and then they typically fax the report back to the clinic or the hospital or wherever it needs to go.”

To Daniel, this process felt like it was “25 or 30 years in the past.” But he also saw multiple emerging technologies converging to enable a solution: “We also saw that digital Pathology was just barely starting to be introduced. Like some labs were starting to buy scanners and exploring what those could do, but nobody really had use cases yet for what the potential of that digital imagery unlocks.”

Building the Full-Stack Solution

Rather than just developing AI software, PathologyWatch made the bold decision to build an end-to-end solution. After interviewing dozens of dermatologists, they consistently heard the same message: “Don’t bring us just a point of the solution or like a piece of it. We get pitched all the time on just a single device or a single thing. What we want is for you to pick up our biopsies, handle everything end to end, show us the digital image, integrate with our electronic medical record system.”

This led to PathologyWatch developing a comprehensive service where they “convince clinics and hospitals to send us volume. We process those inside of our labs. We digitize the image. We then have both a pathologist look at it and then an AI look at it retrospectively to make the diagnosis, and then we push the results into the electronic medical record system of the clinic or the hospital.”

The Power of Digital Pathology

The transformation from analog to digital unlocks powerful new capabilities. As Daniel explains, “The digital image that we capture has a lot of information about how the cancer is growing, how similar that cancer is to previous cancers.” This enables what he calls “prognostics” – the ability to predict disease progression and guide treatment decisions.

Their AI system has shown remarkable capabilities, particularly in early detection: “The AI is extremely good at picking up those very small melanomas and early melanomas that are easy to miss because it’s picking up patterns of a melanoma that might not even be fully formed yet, but that has attributes of a melanoma, because the AI is looking at thousands of inner variables more than the human eye is even seeing.”

The Road Ahead

Looking three to five years into the future, Daniel envisions PathologyWatch becoming the standard for how digital pathology is done. “I think that we’re publishing standards of how digital Pathology is done… I think that the company is doing north of 100 million in revenue.”

The company is already gaining significant traction, with 180 clinics and three hospital partnerships. But Daniel sees this as just the beginning: “We’re trying to tip the industry as this is the way that it’s done. And using digital Pathology is the way of the future.”

The ultimate vision is much bigger than just digitizing existing processes. As Daniel explains, they’re working on “a lot of what’s called prognostics, or trying to give the patient an estimate of likelihood of recurrence, how the patient should be treated.” By combining digital pathology with AI, PathologyWatch isn’t just modernizing an outdated process – they’re creating new possibilities for personalized cancer treatment that simply weren’t possible in the analog era.