Congratulations 6

This is an exciting time to be a pathologist. Our discipline is in the midst of an evolution, with more advances occurring during the last five years than I saw in the previous 20 years. The rise of molecular pathology is a prime example of these changes and how they are markedly altering the way we diagnose a patient’s disease and advise our clinical colleagues about the treatment of their patients. For decades, using a microscope to examine H&E sections has been our primary means of establishing a cancer diagnosis. I certainly don’t expect the microscope to go away—it’s a well-established technology that’s backed up by years and years of pathology experience and, compared to many things we do in medicine, it’s cheap. However, I do believe that in the near future, we are going to come to regard microscopic examination as simply the first step in the evaluation of a tumor; microscopic examination will instead be used to guide us to the molecular tests we will use to identify the driver mutations responsible for the tumor’s pathogenesis and the relevant signaling pathways in our patient’s tumor that should be targeted for personalized treatment. Obviously, the development of these approaches is going to raise a whole host of new challenges as we address issues such as the best practices for applying these ne