What does a 73-year-old Japanese photonics company have to do with your biopsy results? More than you’d think.
In this episode of PathPulse, part of our Behind the Summit series spotlighting the sponsors of the Digital Diagnostic Summit, host Bianca Collings sits down with Stephanie Fullerton, PhD, Director of Life Science Marketing, and Scott M. Blakely, Business Development Manager, at Hamamatsu Photonics. Hamamatsu’s sensors have helped confirm the existence of the Higgs boson, work that earned a Nobel Prize in Physics. That same mastery of light is what’s driving their work in digital pathology, where Hamamatsu has quietly been a pioneer since introducing telepathology in Japan in the mid-1990s.
Stephanie and Scott talk about what “Photon Is Our Business” actually means inside the company, how digitizing a slide changes the entire diagnostic journey for a patient, and what’s kept them at Hamamatsu for a combined four decades. If you’ve ever wondered how a company known for physics ended up shaping how pathologists diagnose cancer, this one’s for you.
Want to meet Hamamatsu and the other trailblazers behind digital pathology in person? Join us at the Digital Diagnostic Summit, August 26–28, 2026, at The St. Regis Deer Valley in Park City, Utah. Three days of sessions, hands-on conversation, and mountain-air networking with the people mapping diagnostic innovation to patient impact. [Register now →]
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Transcript
Bianca Collings: Welcome to PathPulse, Pathology Innovators in Action, your go-to podcast for practical and implemented digital pathology insights.
Welcome to the Digital Diagnostic Podcast, PathPulse. Today we have Hamamatsu joining us. Hamamatsu, founded in 1953 in Japan by a student of the man known as the father of Japanese television. Hamamatsu Photonics has spent over seven decades doing one thing: mastering light. Their sensors help confirm the existence of the Higgs boson, work that earned a Nobel Prize in Physics. A 73-year-old Japanese photonics company is using the same mastery of light that explores the universe to transform how we examine human tissue and save lives. Now that is a story worth telling. I am Bianca Collings, the co-founder and executive director for the Digital Diagnostic Summit. And today I am sitting down with Scott Blakely and Stephanie Fullerton from Hamamatsu to tell it. First, Stephanie, and Scott, would you mind introducing yourselves?
Stephanie Fullerton: Yes, sure. Thanks, Bianca. Yeah, it’s really wonderful to hear sort of the history of Hamamatsu. I’ve been part of Hamamatsu for as long as, going on twenty-four years this year. So my career has really developed at Hamamatsu, and my background is biology. So I did my PhD in neurobiology and ended up working in imaging, and have been at Hamamatsu ever since. And in fact, Scott and I even met long before either of us were here. So we’ve also been in the same industry for a while.
So I’ll leave Scott to introduce himself, and then we’ll get on to the next question.
Scott Blakely: Sure. Thanks, Steph and Bianca. So my name’s Scott Blakely, and I do business development for Hamamatsu in digital pathology. I’ve been with the company for over twenty years. And my, how I got here was, you know, I’ve been in imaging and quantitative microscopy for my entire career, and Hamamatsu is a forerunner of imaging. And so it’s only a natural combining of the paths, really. So —
Stephanie Fullerton: Since we’ll start — yes, exactly. Yeah.
Bianca Collings: Absolutely. So walk me through what Hamamatsu is, and maybe a better description than the one we just offered. How this company born in Japan studying light ended up in the pathology lab.
Stephanie Fullerton: So I’ll take this one, because I didn’t say it, but my job at Hamamatsu is life science marketing director, or marketing director, for our digital pathology and some other life science products, because of my background. But one of the things that I’ve really grown to love about Hamamatsu, which is a bit — a little bit weird — is our tagline, which is “Photon Is Our Business.” So if you see Hamamatsu, you’ll — Hamamatsu, Photon Is Our Business. And maybe it’s a little bit of an awkward phrasing, but what I’ve come to really believe is that for Hamamatsu, and for our engineers, like the photon — the photon is our business, is our DNA. So being able to extract as much information from as few photons as possible, and make it quantitative, and be able to win Nobel Prizes — and it’s not the only one we’re associated with. We also have another one associated with neutrino detection. And so this photonics DNA, we bring this to pathology, because digital pathology is all about light and imaging. And so it’s just a natural progression, and we’re just so passionate about photonics that it works, somehow.
Bianca Collings: I love that. It’s part of your DNA. Absolutely. And a photon is our business. And I wasn’t — I was unaware that you had another Nobel Prize. So congratulations. How long have you been in the digital pathology business? When did this start for Hamamatsu?
Scott Blakely: So that’s a great question. I’ll take that one. So Hamamatsu has always been a company with a lot of visionaries in it. And early in the nineties, we had a visionary at the company who foresaw the need for telepathology — for the ability to transmit a slide over great distances to access the knowledge and information of expert pathologists that may not be where the current pathologist is, in a small hospital.
And it started from there, and we introduced telepathology in Japan in the mid-nineties. And by the early two-thousands, we had prototype scanners where we could scan an entire slide. And by two-thousand-five, they were commercially available in many places in the world. And it’s been a never-ending innovation path ever since then, adding one modality — or another modality, or fluorescence, or, you know, multispectral, or what have you — in today’s market. So —
Bianca Collings: So it’s safe to say Hamamatsu is one of the pioneers of digital pathology, because you were digitizing slides before digital pathology was even a category. It’s — that’s remarkable. So from your point of view, what changes for the pathologist when you move from the glass slide to digital?
Scott Blakely: Absolutely.
Do you want me to take that, Steph?
Stephanie Fullerton: Bingo. You take it, Scott.
Scott Blakely: So, if you’re a pathologist and you’re practicing as you traditionally have, in a microscope, and you’ve got your glass slide — but once you’re looking at that, it’s you and your knowledge and your training, and that’s all you easily have access to. Once you’ve digitized that slide, and you can share it across the globe if necessary, you can access expert knowledge. We call it the democratization of pathology knowledge and experience, right? And so suddenly you can get the best possible diagnostic guidance to help you help your patient.
Bianca Collings: Broadening the tent is what we’ve done. We’ve opened this up, we’ve taken it out of a silo, and it created really a global network of information in this diagnostic journey. Yes. So walk me through what that means for the patient.
Scott Blakely: So from a patient’s perspective — so this is all about, again, it’s all about creating all these new connections, right? Because initially, you’re a patient, you’re in a specific hospital, you have no idea what the expertise is inside that hospital, but that’s where you are. And your biopsy is taken, and it’s processed. And the local pathologist, who’s probably not a specialist, he’s a generalist, is the first one that looks at your slide. And it may be something very obvious, it may not. But if it isn’t, then what? So now, much faster than ever before, again, that information — your health records, everything — can be shared throughout the globe if necessary, to get all of your patient information to the best experts possible, to give guidance back on your diagnosis, and therefore to your clinician, to get you the best possible treatment as quickly as possible. So that’s what it means for a patient: better treatment, faster, and more targeted.
Bianca Collings: Beautiful way to sum up your impact on the innovation — targeted, faster, more accurate — because of the access that we have to that expertise. If you were talking to a patient, how would you sum up how that innovation is working on their behalf? Because I can tell you, as a patient, I’ve no idea — I’ve no idea what happened from the time of biopsy until results were received. I mean, there’s this whole diagnostic team — it’s an ecosystem, right? And in each piece of that relies on the handoff prior to it. And one thing I really love about Hamamatsu, and getting to know your European team as well, is the company really understands the entire diagnostic picture, and you’re not isolated to just, like, a slide scan. So with that, how would you sum up your impact to a patient who has no idea that a scanner’s even involved?
Stephanie Fullerton: I’d like to take the first part of this, but then I’m gonna hand it off a little bit to Scott, because I think there’s a really big picture, and then there’s sort of that workflow picture. And I’ll take the big picture question about, you know, Hamamatsu, and what does it mean to a patient — you know, potentially having their slide scanned on a Hamamatsu scanner. I think the one thing for me, having worked at Hamamatsu for a very long time, and of course in life we all have people that we’re connected to that have been touched by cancer or required some type of biopsy. And we even have a colleague right now who has been surviving with non-small cell lung cancer, and so very aware of his journey as a patient, but also as a fellow colleague and scientist and imager. And so one of the things that I would want to say to a patient is that if your slide is getting scanned on a Hamamatsu scanner, you can be assured that Hamamatsu engineers are absolutely dedicated to making the best products possible. And this is just, like I said, it’s in our DNA. And we strive to bring that “Photon Is Our Business” to everything we do. And that’s meaningful to us beyond just product and market — it’s about people, and it’s about making an impact. So that’s the big picture.
Scott Blakely: Yeah, and I would continue on. I would say to them, you know, for seventy-three years, Hamamatsu has been dedicating itself to improving people’s livelihoods. And now we’re focused on patient health as one aspect of that, right? And so seventy-three years of continuous improvement, continuous learning, continuous engineering expertise culminated in the device that digitizes your slide, to produce the best possible data to pass on to the next parts of the ecosystem. So again, that huge reassurance that everything is getting better for you as a patient.
Bianca Collings: I love that. Your engineers are dedicated to making the best product possible, and seventy-three years of just iteration on that innovation. An image came to mind when you were talking about that — the best product possible, because you’re dealing with human lives. And thinking about my decision — but I want, you know, buying a car, right? I put human lives in my car, and the brand that I chose really went with the safest, most sturdy possible — you know, the highest safety rating of a car. And I know those engineers were dedicated, you know — human lives are going to be in this vehicle. Well, human lives — that tissue that is going through on those — that is a human life. And I love that mission.
I have one more question. I’m not sure if we’ll use it or not, but I do want to ask. Hamamatsu is not the only scanner in the business here. Tell me what makes you different than the competition. I don’t even say competition — maybe we’re friendly. I feel like digital pathology is a very friendly ecosystem. But tell me what makes you different.
Stephanie Fullerton: Again, I’d like to start, and then I’d — again, with a bit of a bigger picture — and then let Scott bring in the details. We work really well on that level. So what makes Hamamatsu different? So you already mentioned that we have the seventy-three years of photonics experience. And I think, when we’ve already noted, that both Scott and I have been at Hamamatsu for over twenty years — I think one of the things that really makes Hamamatsu different is the people and the experience that we bring. If you talk to anybody within our pathology, and our — you know, our digital pathology and our imaging teams — you’ll notice the depth of experience that we have, and the longevity that we have, and the knowledge that we bring, and the collaboration, and that we work together as colleagues, and we bring that also to our partners. And we really do have a connection, kind of, you know — it’s like we have a connection with each other, and we’re bringing up the next generation of people within our organization to carry on this mission. And so, for me, that’s one of the things that’s really made Hamamatsu a special place to work, and an easy product to market.
Scott Blakely: Yeah, and I would agree with everything that Steph just said. Plus, in addition to that, I would say that, again, this continuous drive — we’re constantly looking at the market, we’re looking at the needs. We listen to the patients, we listen to the pathologists. We assess what new modalities might be coming up in the market, whether it’s virtual staining, multiplexing, multispectral, whatever. And so, you know, we’re constantly looking at what is the next device we need to build, and how do we bring, again, that culmination of all of our knowledge and experience into that new device, to continue this road of excellence?
Bianca Collings: I think that’s wonderful. I appreciate what you said, that it’s an easy product to market. And as a marketer, a fellow marketer, I would have a difficult time marketing something that I didn’t believe in and that I wasn’t passionate about. And you know, I have done it. I mean, we don’t all land at a place in our career where we can choose the mission and the value for what we market, but it sure helps that — I mean, it’s patient-centric, and that it sounds like you’re very connected with your market, that you’re listening — you’re listening to the patients, you’re listening to your partners. And I know from my personal experience in working with other Hamamatsu — some of your colleagues — that it is a very collaborative, friendly, human brand, and appreciate everything that you’re doing to move this work forward.
And we were thinking of innovative partners, especially to bring into the Digital Diagnostic Summit, because that’s what we’re doing — it’s those that are on the very forefront of innovation. Top of mind, Hamamatsu. I mean, it’s a very natural fit. So thank you. Thank you so much for your time, and we’re excited to see where the next chapter brings, just brings both of us, as we continue to iterate on this innovation and make that impact on patient lives. So thank you. Thank you, Scott and Stephanie, for joining us today.
Thanks for listening to PathPulse, Pathology Innovators in Action. Tune in next time for more inspiring conversations with digital pathology experts.
