[00:01:42] Aleksandra: Welcome, everyone. Today’s episode is going to be a little bit different because we’re not interviewing scientists. We kind of are, but not about science. We’re not talking about digital pathology or image, not startups or companies in that space. We’re talking about digital pathology websites. There are a couple of them out there on the internet, one you already know. This is where you get your Digital Pathology Podcast from, the Digital Pathology Place. And the other one that we’re featuring today is Pathology News. My guest today is Jonathon Tunstall. I’m going to let him introduce himself in a second. About those websites, we are serving that digital pathology audience.
[00:02:28] Digital Pathology Place and Pathology News are serving the same audience, but from slightly different angles. What we decided to do is to partner together to serve our audience better. We’re going to be talking about this in this episode. Now, welcome, Jonathan. How are you today?
[00:02:49] Jonathon: I’m great. Thank you, Aleks, and it’s wonderful to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
[00:02:53] Aleksandra: Thank you so much for joining.
[00:02:56] Jonathon: I’m really excited. I think you’ve said it all, but we are looking at this very exciting partnership between our businesses and we have a lot of synergy together as we’ve discussed.
[00:03:04] Aleksandra: Very much. But before we dive into it, let’s start with you. Tell us about yourself and about your background.
[00:03:11] Jonathon: Well, I’m a mixed bag really, Aleks. I started in genetics. Studied genetics at St. Andrews, and then I spent a few years in the lab, as many of us do. I eventually joined a company called Applied Imaging. At the time they developed one of the earliest automated karyotyping instruments. That’s really making karyotypes from metaphase images, so peering down a microscope, taking a picture, and cutting that up automatically. This was the late 1980s, and it was really the early days of computer-based imaging. It was a hugely exciting time. I was working in the field. I was an application specialist and I got to work with some of the leading researchers in Japan and the US.
[00:03:55] I was very fortunate because I was also put in charge of a project with the World Health Organization who were based in Geneva, and that was to study the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident. And that was really concerning the liquidators of the Chernobyl incident and how to detect that cohort of individuals from the rest of the population who had abnormal environmental cancers. We developed a method to do that, and we ended up installing metaphase detection instruments in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Really exciting times.
[00:04:30] Aleksandra: And that was when?
[00:04:32] Jonathon: That was the late ’80s.
[00:04:33] Aleksandra: In ’86 or later?
[00:04:34] Jonathon: I’d say that was ’89 to about ’95 I was there and visiting Russia, Ukraine in those days was very interesting. It was early days of glasnost.
[00:04:47] Aleksandra: Wow! That sure is exciting.
[00:04:50] Jonathon: Yeah. I feel very lucky looking back, although it felt very dangerous at the time.
[00:04:54] Aleksandra: Did it?
[00:04:55] Jonathon: Yeah. Then I moved on from that. I spent 10 years in that field and getting to know a lot of people, seeing some amazing science. And then I moved into flow cytometry actually, working with ultra high speed cell sorters, which are themselves incredible instruments. I often think cell sorters represent almost the pinnacle of human ingenuity, because when you imagine being able to sort full populations of cells simultaneously at 60,000 cells per second and the incredible combination of precision fluidics, computer science, laser-based optics and fluorescent labeling that you need to do that. These were just all the things that I enjoyed, so I had a wonderful time in that field as well.
[00:05:41] I do consider I’ve been very lucky in my career because I’ve really traveled constantly for 25 years now. I’ve had the opportunity to meet a lot of scientists all over the world. And that’s given me, I think, quite an understanding of how similar the scientific process is in different countries, but how different the funding, the promotion of new cutting edge science, research science is in different cultures. I think for me, if there’s a single thread that binds all my experiences together, it’s really imaging for pathology. I would say ultimately that’s my real passion, the application of imaging techniques to investigate the etiology and also the status of disease.
[00:06:30] Aleksandra: Cytogenetics is already closer to pathology, but when did you enter the field of digital pathology? How did that come about?
[00:06:38] Jonathon: Well, as many of these things do, Aleks, that was by accident. I was looking to move on from a particular role and actually an old colleague called me to talk about a position at Aperio. There’s the link.
[00:06:50] Aleksandra: Yeah, same with me, by accident.
[00:06:53] Jonathon: That was back in 2008. I worked with Aperio a few years actually on their pharmaceutical side of the business. This time the instruments were functional, quite capable, but I would say still quite rudimentary by modern standards. But more importantly, this time was quite critical I think in slide imaging, because WSI was really just taking off as a methodology to support the discovery and the toxicological side of drug development. All the large pharma companies were buying a lot of scanning instruments. I remember Novartis had 15 at the time and AstraZeneca had 12 at different world sites and they were linking them together through information processes.
[00:07:41] Again, a very interesting time and a new science. For me, that was my initiation into the field of what we now call digital pathology.
[00:07:49] Aleksandra: I mentioned I ended up in digital pathology by accident as well. That was my first position after my residency and I got fascinated with it. What did you do after Aperio? What were your next steps in the digital pathology industry?
[00:08:07] Jonathon: I discovered I really loved our field of digital pathology and I wanted to know more really. I moved on to a project actually working with Dako, but we were building the clinical algorithms for Phillips and Omnix at the time. This was around 2012, 2011. I was actually in charge of managing that project. I later went to PathXL where I was director of strategy, and there I oversaw the development of a couple of the PathXL products. I’m actually one of the inventors of product called TissueMark, which is an algorithm-based detection system for tumor tissue. It both detects the tumor and it gives an estimation of tumor content within the tissue or the piece of tissue on the slide, but that’s designed for subsequent molecular analysis.
[00:09:01] It’s something a little bit different from what we would normally come across in our work with further normal image analysis and the algorithms in digital pathology. After that, I moved on to a clinical CSAM, five years with them. Really I was working there in sort of general medical imaging, mainly in dermatology. I would say looking back, as I said at the start, a bit of a jack of all trades really. I spent roughly 10 years in each of genetics, flow cytometry, and digital pathology. It’s all been fascinating. I feel as though I’ve been very lucky, Aleks, in my career to have gained so much international experience, and I’ve also worked extensively in both research and clinical sectors.
[00:09:46] I feel as though I can see the big picture a little bit nowadays. Maybe that’s just an age thing as well. I’ve had some roles in large corporations and startups. I think now I understand myself. I’m a small company guy. I love the challenges of small organizations. Every day is different and you constantly have to create, gain new skills and reinvent yourself a little bit and reinvent your processes.
[00:10:12] Aleksandra: Definitely in a smaller organization, you have a lot bigger impact on where things are going. I mean, now I’m in a large one. I used to be in a small one. Yeah, different field to it.
[00:10:26] Jonathon: I think I would actually say it requires a greater skill to work in small companies. The times when I’ve worked in large corporate organizations, my job has been very small. If I had ideas beyond my particular domain, I was stepping on someone else’s shoes. Whereas in smaller organizations, you’re expected to do that because you have to. Someone has to pick up that duty.
[00:10:50] Aleksandra: You were in genetics, flow cytometry, digital pathology for like almost all my lifetime. That kind of covers… Well, a little bit less than my lifetime, but that covers like a huge part of life science industry. And now you are the CEO of Pathology News. Why did you set up this business? I assume it’s a smaller organization. That’s why you’re enjoying it so much. But tell me, why did you do that and what did you see there in the market that you thought, “Oh, the market needs Pathology News?”
[00:11:26] Jonathon: Y think it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and I’ve had the seed of this idea and finally reached a point in life where I said to myself, “I’m going to do this before I get too old.” I think at the heart of it, I’ve been on both the vendor and the purchase side throughout my career.
[00:11:45] Aleksandra: Yeah, you know it inside out.
[00:11:47] Jonathon: In many industries, there’s a little bit of an us and them situation between medics and scientists and people on the vendor side. There are good reasons for that because there are pushy salespeople on one side, and then there are people who want to make an empirical, pragmatic decision on the equipment they want to buy. But really what I want to do with pathology news is to bring together the purchasers and vendors within our field of digital computation pathology and to bring them together into a single community where both can benefit. I mean, that’s my notion. Because ultimately we’re the same people. Scientists go from one side to the other all the time and we are one community and we should be focused on advancing our science.
[00:12:32] The way we’ve put that together at Pathology News is we have a number of staff writers producing original scientific content. We combine that with what we call our technology buyers guide, where it’s possible to directly compare and review the latest software and instrumentation. And that’s all on a single site. You can also see upcoming events in the industry with a career section, how you can browse the latest pathology jobs vacancies. We’re trying to be a bit of a one stop shop, provide interest and to keep readers on our side, and at the same time, give them access to be able to review and compare the instrumentation.
[00:13:13] Aleksandra: I’ve seen this part of your website. I hope in our next episodes or whenever we’re going to be talking next, we’re going to dive into it in one form or the other. But there is a part on Pathology News website where you can basically compare different vendors. Let’s say you want to buy software or you want to buy a scanner. You can compare the vendors side by side and know exactly, okay, this device has that specs and does this and that, and the other device the specs are different or the same or whatever. I thought this was super useful. I don’t think there’s anything else online like that.
[00:13:55] Jonathon: No.
[00:13:55] Aleksandra: This is like when you’re thinking of going digital in an organization, when you’re exploring for your organization as somebody working there, that is so powerful. It saves you so much time. Otherwise, you would have to call each company, call the representatives. Here you can shortlist your list, shortlist the equipment you want to buy or the software you want to buy, and then you go after to get more details to those companies that are already on your list. I love this feature.
[00:14:25] Jonathon: Good. Thank you.
[00:14:26] Aleksandra: At Digital Pathology Place, I am trying to do what you’re doing. You want to bring the vendors and the users together. I want to do it on a little bit of a different level on the educational content level. I want to bring computer scientists and pathologists and life scientists together on the knowledge base that they need to have to work together efficiently. I think this is very complimentary what we want to do with our websites.
[00:14:59] Jonathon: Yeah, I do agree. I always cite the example of somebody who’s very new to the industry, say a PhD or a post doc. One day the prof walks in and says, “Can you get us some new software or a new instrument? We’ve got a budget of $200,000.” And that’s a huge responsibility for a young person. You go out to all these companies and they’re all making claims and showing you marketing documents. It’s very difficult to make a practical decision. And of course, your career may depend on making the wrong decision.
[00:15:36] Aleksandra: That is true, or the success of your organization, right?
[00:15:40] Jonathon: Yes, exactly. Really I see a need for that in the market to be able to give people solid comparative information without having to pick up the phone, as you said, to all these different companies. I do think, Aleks, the other thing that I’m really focused on with Pathology News is the fact that we’re in such a moment of huge change in our domain at the moment. We’ve been through the initial scanner phase 15 to 20 years now, and suddenly we’re in a completely new phase of image analysis and AI. The capability of the algorithms are evolving every day. I also think that simultaneously we have a lot of renewed interest in some of the other peripheral imaging techniques, such as confocal in vivo microscopy, Raman spectroscopy.
[00:16:32] It’s going to be fascinating to see how those technologies are going to combine with existing imaging techniques to impact our domain and traditional slide analysis. Also, there are big questions out there for our industry right now, regulation. Will regulation continue to impede the widespread use of computer assisted analysis? What happens to the pathologist and the role of the pathologist in the future? We can imagine as digitization becomes more widespread, we may reach a point where young pathologists are unable to or perhaps they refuse to work with traditional microscopic methods. Do we end up with a two-tier system of clinical services where there are some labs which only provide microscopic analysis at a lower price and others that provide a full digital service?
[00:17:26] What does that mean for the use of the microscope in tissue analysis? These are really important questions, and I think they’re impacting our world right now. I think Pathology News, we want to be able to follow these trends and to… We want to be able to report on them, be at the center of analyzing these changes, and using our writers to be able to uncover some really important facts about the way our science is evolving.
[00:17:53] Aleksandra: Definitely. You have this in the name of the website, Pathology News.
[00:17:58] Jonathon: Exactly.
[00:17:58] Aleksandra: The landscape is changing super fast. Dear listeners, if you’d want to go and get the newest digital pathology news, do not go to Digital Pathology Place because I don’t have news there, but Pathology News has the news and that is one of the reasons that we’re partnering. I already said about my favorite element on the website, this is a comparison tool. But do you have a favorite element on the website or like an area of content that you’re particularly proud of?
[00:18:30] Jonathon: Yeah, I think…
[00:18:31] Aleksandra: I think we’re on the same page, aren’t we?
[00:18:33] Jonathon: We are. I do like the way our technology buyers guide is evolving. We have 11 companies now that have full secondary websites on Pathology News. They have company pages and a separate page for each products and we link together all their events. The company news as well, you can find it in a single place. I’m also proud of … We have a section actually, we do interviews ourselves with some of the key domain experts, key opinion leaders, and that’s coming together very nicely.
[00:19:08] Now we’ve got about 15 of those interviews up on the site, and that’s something we’re going to be expanded dramatically over the next few months, because I do think, and I alluded to this earlier, that can be something which can build into quite a valuable education resource for people who are earlier in their career. And of course, Aleks, our new partnership is very exciting, isn’t it? This is one of my favorite aspects of Pathology News now. We’ve already discussed that we have a lot of synergy between the businesses and I’m really looking forward to being able to promote and share your content on Pathology News.
[00:19:41] Aleksandra: Exactly. Let’s tell you what we’re going to be doing. The Digital Pathology Podcast is going to soon be available through the Pathology News website as well. There is other stuff in the making, but we’re not talking about it yet, but the podcast is going to be available through Pathology News as well. I’m super excited about that, because I want to bring those digital pathology interviews in the podcast form and whatever content we are creating at Digital Pathology Podcast to the broadest audience possible in the Digital Pathology SPACE. And together, we just cover a lot more audience than everyone on their own. I’m super excited about the partnership. Thank you for being our partner.
[00:20:28] Jonathon: Yeah, it’s a pleasure. You summed that up beautifully, by the way. Thank you.
[00:20:32] Aleksandra: Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Jonathon, for joining us today. This episode, of course, is going to be available through Pathology News as well. You can still get it in the email with the Digital Pathology Place newsletter, but now you can access it from wherever you are getting your digital pathology information. Wherever you go first, it’s going to be there and you can listen to it. Thank you so much, Jonathon, and have a great day.
[00:20:58] Jonathon: Oh, thank you, Aleks. It’s been lovely to be here. Thank you for your time.
