Ikonisys focuses on cervical cancer, metastatic cells, and Its future

New Haven, CT

Ikonisys out of New Haven, Connecticut is a company making great strides in the digital pathology business. The company's main product is Ikoniscope Digital Microscope, a "fully automated slide handling, complete slide scanning and real-time image capture and analysis" device (shown below). Medgadget spoke to Petros Tsipouras, MD, the company's Chairman, and to Paul C. White, President of Ikonisys. They are quite excited about the direction the company is taking and its prospects. For example, Ikonisys recently introduced a cervical cancer test called oncoFISH®, designed to predict chances of low grade squamous intraepithelial lesions (LSIL) progressing into a full blown cervical CA. FISH stands for fluorescence in situ hybridization, and the test, or rather the Ikoniscope, automatically looks at the acquisition of specific chromosomal aneuploidies (within the 3q26 region) in cytological specimens revealing LSIL. The machine has a 175 slide load that can be automatically analyzed by Ikoniscope.

In other developments from the company, we learned that Ikonisys will report today that its technology has been validated in a new clinical trial. Conducted by the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford University and published in this month's British Journal of Cancer, the study by Dr. Walter Bodmer, et. al. has shown that the company’s CellOptics® platform and the Ikoniscope® digital microscope offer a viable method for quick detection of circulating tumor cells in the blood.

More about company's technology:

The CellOptics® platform is the foundation for the highly accurate, automated diagnostic tests we offer and represents the fusion of cell and molecular biology, microscopy imaging, artificial intelligence and informatics. Ikonisys realized that none of these technologies could, by itself, satisfy the requirements for completely automated cell based diagnostics, and therefore created the CellOptics platform.

CellOptics provides the tools and protocols to create seamless, highly integrated procedures for automated and unattended cell based diagnostic products, representing a welcome new approach for a discipline that has traditionally required long training and tedious work by laboratory scientists, physicians and technologists.

At the heart of the CellOptics platform sits the Ikoniscope®/IkoniLAN® digital microscope system, which supports a broad spectrum of cell based diagnostic applications. Its exceptional sensitivity and speed make it particularly well suited for rare cell detection with dramatic implications for disease diagnosis, disease monitoring and therapy. Other elements of the CellOptics platform are proprietary processes and technologies including: cell enrichment techniques, staining techniques, specialized slides, antibodies and FISH probes.

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