Akman Pathology: Redefining Pathological Diagnosis to Deliver High-Quality Services to More Patients – A Highlight from Zhangjiang Gaoke 895 Venture Camp

Since relocating to the Kangpeng Life Science Industrial Park in Putuo District in August 2019, Shanghai Akerman Medical Laboratory (hereinafter referred to as “Akerman Pathology”) has become the largest single-entity pathology diagnostic center in China. This marks a crucial step in its leapfrog development, fulfilling the goal explicitly set by its founder, Dr. Ge Junhui, six years earlier when establishing the medical laboratory: to enable broader access to high-quality pathology diagnostic services. By March 2020, Akerman Pathology had established collaborations with more than 800 secondary and tertiary hospitals across China, engaging over 5,000 clinical and pathologists, thereby emerging as one of the most representative third-party pathology diagnostic centers in the country.

Prior to founding Akerman Pathology, Dr. Ge Junhui served as an Associate Professor and Associate Chief Physician in the Department of Pathology at Changzheng Hospital, affiliated with the Second Military Medical University. He completed his undergraduate studies at the Fourth Military Medical University, and his master’s and doctoral degrees at the Second Military Medical University. Since transitioning to pathological research during his master’s program, he has been engaged in clinical pathological diagnosis for over 20 years.

Dr. Ge Junhui embodies the quintessential traits of a physician-entrepreneur, combining a focus on clinical needs and patient experience with a strong sense of social responsibility and mission characteristic of business leaders. In his view, pathological diagnosis determines the surgical approach, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and targeted therapy regimens for cancer patients, making it an essential component throughout the entire course of clinical treatment. “What Shanghai Akerman Medical Laboratory has been committed to is taking the needs of patients and healthcare institutions at all levels as our starting point, driven by innovative development, to ensure that more people have access to high-quality pathological diagnostic services.”

Dr. Ge Junhui places great emphasis on the expert capabilities that pathologists develop through accumulated experience, as well as on the significance of optimizing pathological diagnosis. At Shanghai Akerman Medical Laboratory Co., Ltd., traditional morphological pathology plays a pivotal role in diagnostic practice, enabling the pathology team to gradually cultivate specialized expertise and build a brand distinguished by its proficiency in diagnosing challenging cases. Building upon traditional morphological pathology and integrating immunohistochemistry, molecular diagnostics, and personalized therapeutic testing protocols, Shanghai Akerman has established a comprehensive “four-in-one” pathological diagnosis and treatment platform. This platform delivers standardized, precise, integrated pathology reports and provides hospitals at all levels with accurate, customized pathological solutions.

Third-party pathology diagnostic centers are independent legal entities capable of issuing pathology diagnostic reports and independently assuming corresponding legal liabilities. They are typically characterized by sufficient funding, large scale, advanced and comprehensive instrumentation, high diagnostic quality, superior service, and high technological content. These centers have emerged in response to the growing demand for refined pathology diagnostics under the backdrop of personalized medicine, addressing the inadequacy of existing pathological diagnostic capabilities within hospitals through social resources.

In recent years, the number of new cancer cases has been on the rise, leading to a continuous increase in the demand for pathological diagnosis. According to statistics from the National Cancer Registry Center, the number of new cancer cases in China increased from 3.157 million in 2010 to 4.2916 million in 2015, representing a 35.94% increase over five years. As the “gold standard” for cancer diagnosis, pathological diagnosis will face substantial future demand driven by the rising incidence of cancer. Meanwhile, therapeutic approaches such as “targeted therapy” and “immunotherapy” are becoming increasingly mature and widely used in clinical practice. Precise pathological diagnosis is an essential prerequisite for precision personalized oncology treatment; it is no longer limited to tumor diagnosis but plays a comprehensive role in subsequent treatment planning. New clinical oncology treatment regimens require pathological diagnosis to provide more robust evidence and support, thereby imposing higher requirements on its accuracy.

Constrained by the severe shortage of pathologists in China, it is difficult to fully meet the demand for pathological diagnosis relying solely on the resources of public hospitals. Furthermore, according to the "Measures for the Hierarchical Management of Hospitals," the departmental setup of secondary general hospitals must include a pathology department. With the accelerated growth in the number of secondary hospitals, the restructuring of pathological diagnostic resources has become inevitable. Third-party pathological diagnosis centers represent an effective solution that leverages social forces to address the supply-demand imbalance in pathological diagnostics.

Dr. Ge Junhui told VCBeat that in recent years, the state has provided strong support for the development of third-party pathological diagnosis. On one hand, policies encouraging and guiding private medical practice, allowing physicians to practice at multiple locations, and establishing comprehensive standards and regulations for third-party testing institutions to conduct pathological examinations have provided significant momentum for third-party pathology diagnostic centers to optimize resource allocation and improve the penetration rate of diagnostic capabilities.

On the other hand, pathology diagnosis fee standards are gradually being raised across various regions. Taking Guangdong Province as an example, according to the "Guangzhou Public Medical Institutions' Medical Service Items and Prices" disclosed by the Guangdong Provincial Government, pathology diagnosis was one of the medical testing items that saw a counter-trend increase in fee standards between 2015 and 2017. Amidst the broader trend of cost containment in laboratory testing, the average fee standard for pathology diagnosis services increased by 29.61% against the trend. This undoubtedly reflects policy support for the development of pathology diagnosis, injecting strong momentum into a field that had long been constrained by excessively low fee standards and struggled to achieve financial self-sustainability.

As a valuable complement to hospital pathology departments, third-party pathology diagnostic centers have improved the efficiency of pathological diagnosis and, to some extent, alleviated the financial burden on the government. However, Dr. Ge Junhui points out that, from a professional pathology perspective, there is still significant room for improvement in third-party pathology diagnostic services. “On the basis of strict quality management, enhancing diagnostic accuracy and strengthening the team’s professional capabilities are key factors.”

Dr. Ge Junhui told VCBeat that Akerman Pathology strictly adheres to a “four-in-one” framework—integrating pathological morphology, immunohistochemistry, personalized diagnosis, and personalized therapeutic testing—to deliver comprehensive pathology reports. These reports address multifaceted diagnostic needs, including molecular subtyping, medication guidance, early screening, genetic risk assessment, prognosis evaluation, and dynamic monitoring. A key guarantee of the report quality lies in the fact that Akerman Pathology’s experts, management, and staff are primarily recruited from public hospitals. The organization strictly follows the standards of established domestic and international hospital pathology departments in areas such as quality system construction, diagnostic process management, acquisition of reference materials, professional development programs, accountability tracing for diagnoses, implementation of initial and repeat testing, management of complex cases, and application of various cutting-edge testing methods.

In 2016, Akerman Pathology initiated efforts to co-establish a clinical consultation platform for challenging pathology cases in collaboration with the Shanghai Clinical Pathology Slide Reading Conference. By serving as the operational platform and organizer for the Shanghai Clinical Pathology Slide Reading Conference, and by providing platforms for immunohistochemistry and molecular pathology testing, Akerman Pathology has joined forces with more pathologists and professors to deliver more professional, reliable, and precise pathological diagnostic reports to patients across China. It has gradually established multiple pathology subspecialties, adopting a top-down approach to meet the pathological diagnostic needs of patients from diverse sources.

By the end of September 2020, Akerman Pathology had established more than ten subspecialty pathology groups, including soft tissue, lymphohematopoietic, nervous system, breast, urinary system, reproductive system, digestive system, lung and pleura, head and neck, skin, and bone. According to Dr. Ge Junhui, each subspecialty pathology group at Akerman Pathology is centered around one to two nationally renowned subspecialty pathology experts. These experts are affiliated with institutions such as Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center, Huashan Hospital, Changhai Hospital, Eastern Hepatobiliary Surgery Hospital, Renji Hospital, Xinhua Hospital, Shanghai Sixth People’s Hospital, and Shanghai Ninth People’s Hospital.

In terms of hardware infrastructure, Akerman Pathology has established three major technical platforms: IHC, FISH, and PCR sequencing. The IHC platform features nearly 400 immunohistochemical antibodies, covering antibody markers for all eight major human body systems and the entire spectrum of human tumor diseases. The FISH platform is equipped with more than 60 types of FISH probes, supporting precise diagnosis and targeted therapy for a variety of mainstream cancers at the current stage. The PCR sequencing platform offers testing for most tumor molecular projects.

In recent years, with the gradual advancement of tiered diagnosis and treatment, new models that transform traditional diagnostic and therapeutic processes—such as medical consortia, medical communities, specialty alliances, and telemedicine—have continuously emerged and been optimized. Regionalization has become a significant industry trend for third-party pathology diagnostic centers. In August 2018, Akerman Pathology secured Series A financing from Fortune Capital (Dachen Caizhi) and Boxing Capital, accelerating its nationwide market expansion and the establishment of regional pathology centers. The Yichang Akerman Pathology Diagnostic Center has officially commenced operations, better providing high-quality pathology diagnostic services to the southwestern region of Hubei Province.

Dr. Ge Junhui stated that in the new stage of development, Akerman Pathology is committed to providing professional, practical, and tailored pathology solutions to medical institutions at all levels, with a focus on primary care hospitals where pathology services are relatively weak. These solutions include customizable routine pathology, intraoperative frozen section analysis, immunohistochemistry, molecular laboratories, telepathology, quality management, and discipline development plans, while also promoting the establishment of regional pathology diagnostic centers. To ensure the efficient operation of this bottom-up pathology diagnostic system, Akerman Pathology has also built pathology informatics infrastructure, including an information-based pathology service platform, the Akerman Pathology Cloud Platform, and a pathology big data ecosystem.

Specifically, the primary objective of Akerman Pathology is to assist healthcare institutions of a certain scale in establishing regional pathology centers, and to help primary healthcare facilities build standardized pathology workstations. In daily operations, these standardized pathology workstations, along with township-level and lower-tier medical institutions that have not established such nodes, send intraoperative pathological slides to regional pathology centers for diagnosis. In cases of difficult or complex pathological diagnoses, specimens are further referred to Shanghai Akerman Pathology in Shanghai for expert consultation.

In fact, pathological diagnosis, which is of paramount importance in healthcare, has long been a bottleneck hindering improvements in medical efficiency and effectiveness. We are deeply moved by the enduring commitment of pathologists like Dr. Ge Junhui to upholding the quality of pathological diagnosis. Furthermore, we hope that Akerman Pathology’s combined top-down and bottom-up approach will truly enable high-quality pathological diagnosis to benefit more patients.

Writing Reference:

Akerman: Completes Tens of Millions in Series A Financing Led by Fortune Capital, with Follow-on Investment from Boying Capital

“The Gold Standard for Diagnosis”—The Development of Third-Party Pathological Diagnosis in China

Reflections on Third-Party Pathology Diagnostic Centers