NEW YORK – Point-of-care diagnostic firm GBS announced on Thursday that it has entered a sponsored research agreement with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to accelerate the development of saliva-based diagnostic tests.
The collaboration between iQ Group subsidiary GBS and the Johns Hopkins Environmental Health Microbiology and Immunology Laboratory will support the lab's research into saliva testing and diagnostics and will help inform GBS's commercialization strategy for two of its rapid point-of-care tests, the SARS-CoV-2 Antibody Biosensor and the Saliva Glucose Biosensor, which run on its Biosensor Platform.
Under the agreement, New York City-based GBS will work with the lab's Salivary Biomarkers and Infectious Diseases Program to "identify new biomarkers best matched to testing via a salivary matrix," GBS said in a statement. Johns Hopkins researchers will conduct in-field epidemiologic investigations using GBS devices to understand the prevalence of different diseases in at-risk populations, the company added.Â
Further terms of the collaboration were not disclosed.