Life Technologies Corp, Carlsbad, Calif, has entered into a master development agreement with Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, New York, for current and future companion diagnostics projects. The current agreement constitutes the second collaboration between the two companies.
The agreement covers an initial project for oncology and provides for a long-term partnership across a potentially broad range of Life instrument platforms and a wide range of therapeutic areas.
“The pharmaceutical industry is increasingly turning its focus to discovering and delivering targeted, personalized medications,” says Ronnie Andrews, president of medical sciences at Life Technologies. “As more and more targeted drugs come onto the market in the next decade, there will be a growing need for diagnostics that can help predict which patients will benefit from which drugs.
“For oncology alone, hundreds of agents are currently in clinical trials,” says Andrews, “and we see strong market opportunity in the robust expansion this will mean for the companion diagnostics space.” These platforms span both genetic and proteomic analysis, including next-generation sequencing, Sanger sequencing, qPCR, flow cytometry and immuno-histochemistry. In addition, the company recently announced that its Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine would be developed for proteomics capabilities.
[Source: Life Technologies]
