Quantitative Molecular Microscopy

Traditional histopathology analysis has two basic problems. First, it isn't granular enough: Pathologists typically grade overall marker-staining intensity using a four-point scale. The other problem is that these measurements don't account for the sometimes-subtle changes in subcellular localization that can indicate disease. Beta-catenin, for instance, is a biomarker for colon cancer, but only when localized to the nucleus. Yale University pathologists Bob Camp and David Rimm developed a series of algorithms called AQUA (Automated Quantitative Analysis) to overcome these shortcomings, providing compartment-specific staining-intensity data over the range of 0 to 255, which has been shown to be directly proportional to absolute protein concentrations.