NEW YORK – Agilent Technologies, the National University of Singapore, and National University Hospital in Singapore today launched a new S$38 million ($27.4 million) R&D center to develop new methods of transforming clinical research into diagnostics.
The NUS-Agilent Hub for Translation & Capture has laboratories at NUS and NUH and is intended to improve accuracy of clinical diagnostics using data from blood samples and data analytics.
The facility, which has a combined 10,763 square feet of research space, is also meant to foster multidisciplinary collaborations between scientists, clinicians and members of the industry.
The partners noted the center will leverage research in lipidomics and synthetic biology, and that initial areas of focus will be cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
"The population we care for in NUH is changing rapidly," said Eugene Liu, CEO of NUH and an associate professor at NUS. "This tripartite partnership enables NUH to apply emerging technologies from the university and industry to improve clinical laboratory testing. Validating biomedical breakthroughs from NUS and translating these to clinical care will benefit patients."
Today's announcement is a continuation of a longstanding relationship between Agilent and NUS, the partners said. In 2015 Agilent announced it would provide access to its bioanalytical instruments to the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine to study patient responses to cardiovascular medicines. The year before that, the company said it would participate in an international research consortium led by NUS to develop the world's first lipid 1 database for healthy persons of different racial and ethnic groups.