NEW YORK – Danaher announced Wednesday that it has launched two new laboratories in the US and the UK that are intended to accelerate drug development by streamlining the development and commercialization of companion diagnostics and complementary diagnostics.
The DH Diagnostics LLC Centers will be Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA)- and College of American Pathologists (CAP)-certified labs that bring multiple Danaher subsidiaries under one roof, the Washington D.C.-based conglomerate said in a statement. The first laboratory is scheduled to open this month in Newcastle, UK, and will serve as a collaborative research hub with pharmaceutical and academic institutions. It is located on the campus of Danaher subsidiary Leica Biosystems. The CLIA and CAP certifications for the lab are pending, Danaher noted.
The second laboratory is situated in an unspecified location in the US and is scheduled to open later this year. It will include immunohistochemistry, PCR, and immunoassay capabilities, and instrumentation from Danaher subsidiaries Cepheid, Beckman Coulter Diagnostics, and Leica Biosystems will be available. Additional instruments and capabilities from other subsidiaries will be added in the future, and other modalities like next-generation sequencing will also be available.
"The pharmaceutical industry needs a new, holistic approach that minimizes time-consuming assay format transfers and contracts across every step, from biomarker validation to clinical trial assays and companion and complementary diagnostics, to global deployment, education, and adoption," DH Diagnostics CSO Amit Agrawal said in a statement. "I believe our new approach to catalyzing development of meaningful diagnostics has the potential to bring us significantly closer to realizing the potential of precision medicine to deliver the right medicine for the right patient at the right time."