Meet Itai Hayut, CEO at Medical Device Company: Scopio Labs

Scopio Labs is a medical device company shaping the future of blood diagnostics. Scopio is the first to develop a completely digital end-to-end imaging and analysis platform for hematology testing. This notoriously manual process primarily relies on outdated and labour-intensive equipment, namely the microscope.

Solving the trade-off between field-of-view and resolution, Scopio’s innovative Full-Field technology enables laboratory professionals to image and analyse digital blood samples at 100X resolution, eliminating the need for further manual microscopic examination.

Scopio’s high resolution digital images can be reviewed by experts physically in the lab or remotely, facilitating collaboration and consultation from anywhere, anytime, through a secure hospital network.
 
 
Scopio Labs and SYNLAB's Veterinary Pathology Group Partner to Bring First  In-practice Digital Cytology Solution to the UK
 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
Erez Naaman, my Co-Founder, and I, both come from physics and electro-optics backgrounds and studied at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem together.

At the time, there was a lot of excitement around computer vision and deep learning to access more data and to reveal new insights. We witnessed hematology lab practitioners still using traditional microscopes and counting cells manually, a time consuming, tedious, and often error prone process. It was surprising to see the medical world rely solely on manual microscopy to perform important diagnostic blood testing, especially since there was no way to easily collaborate with specialists in remote locations.

Cell morphology review was localized, which could mean a delay in reaching a diagnosis or the initiation of life-saving treatment. When we couldn’t find a scanner that could scan and digitize blood samples quickly, and in high enough resolution, we set out to build one ourselves. That’s where our story began.

Today we are the first company to produce high quality digital images and completely digitize cell morphology review, with remote connectivity from anywhere, providing early and accurate diagnoses of blood-related cancers, infections, and more.
 

 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

 
In the past couple of years, Scopio has obtained FDA clearance and CE mark for its Full-Field Peripheral Blood SmearTM Application, enabling us to officially launch our commercial efforts across the US and Europe. Earlier this year we raised $50M in a Series C funding round, growing the global team with employees located in Israel, Europe and the US.

In July 2022, we signed a worldwide partnership agreement with Beckman Coulter, a leading global diagnostics company, to accelerate the growth of our international customer base. Most recently, Scopio launched the revolutionary CE-Marked Full-Field Bone Marrow Aspirate in Europe, the first platform to enable a complete digital workflow for bone marrow samples.
 

What can we hope to see from Scopio in the future?

 
Our goal is to completely replace manual microscopy in haematology laboratories with fully digital AI-powered platforms. To that end, we have a robust pipeline of applications leveraging Scopio’s ground-breaking Full-Field imaging technology and advances in AI, going beyond the limitations of the human eye and manual microscopic examination.

Scopio will enable lab professionals, hematologists, and hematopathologists to analyze not hundreds, but thousands to millions of cells at a scale and depth that has never been done before, transforming the future of blood-related disease detection and diagnosis.