NeoPath, Inc. (NASDAQ: NPTH) was a U.S. medical-device company founded in 1989 and headquartered at 8271 154th Ave NE, Redmond, Washington. It was a public company following an IPO in 1996, and PitchBook reports roughly 174 employees at its peak. Its SIC classification was electromedical and electrotherapeutic apparatus. The company is no longer independent: it merged with AutoCyte, Inc. (NASDAQ: ACYT) in a stock swap completed in 1999 to form TriPath Imaging, Inc. (NASDAQ: TPTH), headquartered in Burlington, North Carolina. Becton, Dickinson and Company acquired the TriPath shares it did not already own in December 2006 for approximately $362 million.
Products / operations. NeoPath developed image-analysis and "visual intelligence" technology for automated cytology. Its main product was the AutoPap System: the AutoPap 300 QC System, cleared by the FDA in September 1995 for quality-control rescreening of conventionally prepared Pap smears, and the AutoPap Primary Screening System, which received FDA premarket approval in May 1998 as the first fully automated device for primary screening of Pap smear slides (classifying up to 25% as requiring no further human review). The company also pursued liquid-based preparation compatibility work with Cytyc's ThinPrep system and imaging/software work (e.g., multidimensional image-processing patents). Customers included large national labs and HMOs, including SmithKline Beecham Clinical Laboratories and Kaiser Permanente. This is an operating company, not a patent-assertion entity.
Litigation posture. NeoPath appears once in the tracked data, as a defendant — an operating company defending a competitor's suit, not an NPE. The case, Neuromedical Systems, Inc. v. NeoPath, Inc. (S.D.N.Y., filed July 15, 1996), alleged that NeoPath "willfully misappropriated" Neuromedical Systems' automated cervical cytology reader technology and engaged in false advertising and unfair competition. The venue is the Southern District of New York, not a plaintiff-friendly Texas district. The court declined to issue a preliminary injunction against NeoPath's AutoPap 300 QC. NeoPath separately sued Neuromedical in March 1997 in the Western District of Washington, alleging infringement of three NeoPath patents by NSI's PAPNET system — a competitor-versus-competitor dispute over automated Pap-smear screening.