TissueInformatics Inc announced that the U.S. Patent Office has granted the company a key patent for the robust detection and quantification of stain on histological tissue slides.

A histological tissue slide is a glass microscope slide containing a thin section of human or animal tissue, which has been carefully fixed and stained so it may be reviewed by a pathologist. The staining of the tissue makes the structural elements within the tissue visible when the sample is viewed under a microscope and thereby enables the pathologist to evaluate the structural and functional changes produced in the tissue by disease.

Particular characteristics of the intensity of staining, the portion of the tissue that is stained and, the location of stain within the tissue, can provide important diagnostic information about the tissue specimen that is important to both the classification of disease, as well as to the discovery of new drugs.

TissueInformatics' U.S. patent (#6577754) includes 7 claims. These claims cover TissueInformatics' unique method of using the amount of light absorbed by a histological stain to calculate the amounts of stain and the amount of a tissue feature located in a specimen. This novel method of stain quantification enables several improvements over existing methods including: 1) the detection of tissue on a histological slide by automated robotic microscopes; 2) improvements to auto-focus algorithms ensuring that automated digital imaging of histological slides is confined to tissue areas only; 3) improvements to automated image segmentation and the identification of tissues and their structural features; 4) improvements to the identification of individual stains when multiple stains are used, and 5) improvements to the quantification of the extent of staining.

"This patent protected invention by TissueInformatics has a direct and significant impact on accelerating drug discovery as it facilitates high-throughput automated tissue slide analysis." said Dr. Peter Johnson, TissueInformatics Chairman and CEO.

TissueInformatics accelerates the drug discovery process by providing a broad range of tissue analysis software, tissue analysis services, and drug target discovery solutions to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and CRO industries.