The Pathologist

As a breast pathologist, receiving a breast cancer diagnosis changed Kim Allison's perspective on the disease forever. Later, emerging from treatment as a survivor, she found that writing about her experiences helped her process their impact. Her book, Red Sunshine: A Story of Strength and Inspiration from a Doctor Who Survived Stage 3 Breast Cancer, has since provided comfort, answers, and hope to other patients with breast cancer around the world.

Author’s Note: This article does not arise from cold academic statistics, but from over three decades of practicing pathology, university teaching, and, above all, a moment of silent confrontation in front of the mirror at my own dining room table. What I share here is not a technical analysis, but an intimate reflection and an honest self-critique on how we are transmitting – or failing to transmit – the mystique and the soul of our discipline to the next generation of physicians.

Researchers have identified CALB2 as a gene associated with the ability of metastatic prostate cancer cells to survive the mechanical forces encountered in the bloodstream. Published in Advanced Science, the study suggests that CALB2 may serve as a marker of tumor cells that have adapted to survive circulation during metastasis, offering a potential avenue for future biomarker and therapeutic research.

Clinical laboratories continue to navigate workforce shortages, evolving regulatory requirements, financial pressures, and rapidly changing healthcare environments. While technical expertise remains essential, today’s laboratory leaders must also excel in communication, strategic thinking, change management, and team development.

A blood test that measures the tuberculosis-specific protein ESAT-6 could provide clinical laboratories with a new way to identify active pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) in patients who cannot produce sputum, according to research presented at the 2026 Association for Diagnostics & Laboratory Medicine (ADLM) Annual Meeting.

Audrey Bennett is Senior Medical Manager at Roche Diagnostics. Credit: Roche Diagnostics | Images for collage sourced from Adobe Stock How close are we to a point where AI systems can generate clinically actionable results without a pathologist reviewing every case? The current trajectory of computational pathology does not aim to replace the pathologist or create systems where pathologists do not review cases.

A commonly used HbA1c immunoassay may fail to identify prediabetes and diabetes in people with sickle cell trait, raising concerns that some laboratories could be underdiagnosing the condition in populations where hemoglobin variants are common.

Chris Scarisbrick is Customer Operations Director and Deputy Managing Director at Sectra. Many regional procurement strategies in the UK are still treating radiology and pathology as separate entities when it comes to the imaging platforms that underpin workflows. But with ever-increasing pressures on diagnostic services, is it time to change that mindset?

Dr Raimundo Geronimo Junior is President of the Brazilian Society of Pathology (SBP). A passionate advocate for medical education, he actively contributes to pathology education through governmental channels and social media, inspiring a new generation of pathologists across Brazil and beyond. Here, he joins Ivan Damjanov to discuss Brazilian pathology, the opportunities and challenges facing the specialty, and his vision for its future.

Machine learning significantly improved the diagnostic accuracy of plasma metanephrine testing for rare adrenal tumors in a large real-world study, but researchers also found that the apparent gains could be misleading unless artificial intelligence models are carefully audited before clinical use.