TissueInformatics Inc.

Minneapolis is a mecca for medical device companies; Cambridge and the Bay Area are cradles of biotechnology; and Pittsburgh is making a name for itself in tissue engineering, thanks to the Pittsburgh Tissue Engineering Initiative (PTEI), a non-profit corporation that supports regional tissue engineering efforts coming out of such institutions as Carnegie Mellon University , the University of Pittsburgh , Allegheny University of the Health Sciences, Duquesne University, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. In 1997, reconstructive surgeon Peter Johnson, MD, the founder and president of the PTEI, saw an opportunity in TissueInformatics Inc. to support the tissue engineering industry with informatics tools that enabled the analysis and digital cataloguing of tissue images and data. But it appears that the usefulness of TissueInformatics' platform extends beyond tissue engineering—the company has come along at just the right time to also serve a growing need for digital tissue analysis tools by biorepositories as well as by pharmaceutical companies using tissue samples to validate genomics discovery efforts.

TissueInformatics has filed eight patents covering technologies in the convergence of imaging and bioinformatics. It has developed unique imaging and...