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Today’s trends 

There is a worrying trend taking place around the globe: the increased number of cancer diagnoses. By 2022, cancer will have become the number one cause of death worldwide. Furthermore, 1 in 2 of us will be diagnosed with cancer in our lifetime, while, globally, 1 in 6 deaths are caused by cancer. By 2040, cancer cases are expected to increase by 10 million and the cancer mortality rate is predicted to grow by nearly 7 million.

Due to COVID-19, various countries had postponed routine cancer screening, which has resulted in even more backlogs and delayed diagnoses. Because of this delay, 44% of countries worldwide reported an increase in service backlogs for cancer screening in 2021. These backlogs have become challenging to manage in real-time; lab employees have a considerable amount of tissue to handle, which creates a stressful, unhappy, frustrating work environment.

Highlights from the histopathology field

This is why Sakura Finetek works hard to innovate instruments and solutions to help minimise this backlog and improve the work environment of your laboratory. We aim to enable you to optimise the workflow in your lab, thus contributing positively to the patient journey and to the preparations for the foreseeable trends in histopathology and cancer diagnoses.

Over the years, pathology labs have surpassed significant milestones in different countries and regions. Some techs were able to work remotelythroughout the pandemic, thanks to steps taken towards digital pathology. Some lab techs could make their diagnoses twice as fast as before, while others even made same-day diagnoses the very first time. Various laboratories reported record-breaking improvements: a +372% increase in embedding; tripling tissue block embedding and staining capacity with fewer than 50% of the original number of staff; and people improving and optimising their workflow. One lab reached 1 millionprocessed cassettes by using the Tissue-Tek Xpress 120 automated rapid tissue processor.

Happy lab technicians are productive lab technicians  

Speed and quality of the output are important in laboratory environments. However, it’s also about the well-being of the lab techs and employees. Our lab expressed that they could see that their staff members were less frustrated and stressed because Sakura lab automation optimised their workflow. On some occasions, technicians’ feelings even turned to peace and comfort after the improvements. Now more focused, they could try out different and new approaches.

These achievements are great examples of how some labs are tackling and improving their workflow across Europe. At Sakura our compassion and dedication drive us to positively contribute to your histopathology lab’s overall balance and output. Watch the below movie and see how we do our part to improve cancer patient care. 

Patient Journey with Sakura Finetek


Sakura Finetek provides solutions for specific steps in the pathology lab throughout the histopathology process. Our objective is to keep the long-term perspective in mind, which helps us to improve cancer diagnostics and, therefore, the cancer patient journey. We supply laboratories around the world with the tools they need to work quickly, more efficiently and generate accurate results with exceptional quality.