Spotlight Pathology raising £1.4 million to catch blood cancer sooner

Blood cancer is the UK's third biggest cancer killer, yet three in ten patients are diagnosed only after an emergency hospital admission. Research by Black et al. (2023), published in Primary Health Care Research & Development, found that patients diagnosed via this route have a three-year survival rate of 40%, compared with 77% among those identified through planned GP referral. The bottleneck is diagnostic: only 3% of NHS histopathology departments have sufficient staff to meet clinical demand, according to the Royal College of Pathologists.

Spotlight Pathology, a spin-out from the University of Manchester founded by Dr Richard Byers, Consultant Haematopathologist, and Dr Martin Fergie, an AI specialist with over fifteen years of experience developing healthcare algorithms, was built to address this issue directly. Its machine learning software analyses digital pathology images to help identify potential blood cancer cases, automating cell counting, tissue classification and spatial analysis within existing digital pathology systems.

This means that new hardware is not needed and clinical judgement remains with the pathologist throughout. As AI enters regulated clinical environments, the ability to integrate with existing procurement and infrastructure frameworks is becoming an essential prerequisite for NHS adoption.

Spotlight Pathology recently raised £1.4 million in seed funding from the UK Innovation and Science Seed Fund, managed by Future Planet Capital, to support regulatory approvals and its first clinical in-use trials.

Sources: Spotlight Pathology | PubMed | The Royal College of Pathologists