"All significant breakthroughs are break–"widths" old ways of...

"All significant breakthroughs are break–"widths" old ways of thinking."

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

My friends,

Tiresias has talked previously on the revolutionary aspects of Optiscan’s Confocal Laser digital real-time 3D Endomicroscopy (CLE) Platform technology. Tiresias has indicated that this is going to revolutionise histopathology, cancer diagnosis, cancer surgery, and treatment. Revolutions, however, do not happen overnight. Though some people imagine that suddenly somebody has a good idea, everybody sees, and revolution immediately takes place. As they say in show business however, “my overnight success took 20 years”. But Medicine is not show business. Medicine is a far more difficult and conservative stage. There are many perverse economic incentives and disincentives to innovation. These include entrenched practices, people clinging onto old practices and their lucrative returns, regulatory authorities and bureaucracies at many levels, and just plain old inertia. As Max Planck said, new ideas do not come and are not adopted because people become convinced of them, it is that the people who held the old ideas die. Tiresias doesn’t think it’s quite as bad as this in medicine, as there are carrots and sticks which do push the system faster, but still too slowly.

In last week’s post Tiresias discussed the importance of Optiscan’s acquisition of the Dataset of Intellectual Property (IP) of 228 patients with oral pre-cancer and cancer tissue with documentation and correlation of confocal digital microscopy and conventional histopathology. This is critical to the acceleration of the of the digital revolution in pathology and cancer diagnosis and treatment. This will not only bring Optiscan’s platform technology to the attention of more scientific and medical technology manufacturers’ attention but also to the investors in MedTech. They will see Optiscan brings a whole new paradigm to pathology and cancer treatment. They, or some of them, will see the IP is there for a secondary revolution. The EP is enough for not only satisfying FDA and regulatory authorities and doctors in the field, but also for machine learning/AI for the introduction of AI, in recognition and pathological diagnosis in real time in the clinic and the operating room. This is the revolution(s) and it is here and it is taking place. But overnight success does take time.