Philips and Mount Sinai Health System collaborate to advance clinical research through new digital pathology database and analytics

Eindhoven, The Netherlands and New York, USA – Royal Philips (NYSE:PHG, AEX:PHIA) today announced a joint development agreement with the Mount Sinai Health System, an integrated health system in New York, to create a state-of-the-art digital image repository of patient tissue samples and innovative data analytics to pursue the discovery of new tissue-based tests and unlock pathology data. The collaboration aims to advance clinical research and ultimately enable better care for complex diseases, including cancer.

Pathology, including the examination of patient tissue samples, is one of the corner stones of modern medicine. The Mount Sinai Health System comprises seven hospital campuses serving approximately 170,000 inpatients and 2.6 million outpatients annually. Over the years, these sites have collectively stored hundreds of thousands of tissue samples in the form of glass tissue slides. Philips and Mount Sinai will now start to create a comprehensive digital image repository containing the digital scans of all these glass tissue slides. Ultimately, these data will be made accessible to researchers. By integrating, analyzing and presenting the data available from whole slide pathology images, clinical laboratory services, genetic analysis, radiology, and surgical and molecular pathology, Philips and Mount Sinai believe the unique insights obtained will enable the development of predictive analytics to help personalize patient care.

“The digitization of pathology gives us the unprecedented opportunity to access vast amounts of unlocked data and view it within the context of other images, results and clinical information,” said Frans van Houten, CEO Royal Philips. “It is our vision that our improved understanding of these data will help us enable better, more individualized care with greater confidence.”

“This collaboration with Philips has the potential to help drive a new paradigm in healthcare that includes the optimization of treatment efficacy and superior clinical outcomes,” said Dr. Carlos Cordon-Cardo M.D., Ph.D., Chairman of the Department of Pathology at the Mount Sinai Health System. “Our ultimate goal with this initiative is to translate data into knowledge to maximize personalized patient management.”

 Mount Sinai is committed to partnering with industry to develop innovative therapies and diagnostics that improve the lives of patients worldwide. The terms of this collaboration agreement were managed by Mount Sinai Innovation Partners, the technology development and commercialization group for the Mount Sinai Health System.