NEW YORK – Oxford Nanopore Technologies and BioMérieux announced on Friday a partnership to develop in vitro diagnostic (IVD) tests for infectious diseases.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The companies said they are investigating certain opportunities to bring nanopore sequencing to the infectious disease diagnostics market, with initial areas of collaboration to include developing an IVD test for determining antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis, an assay to identify pathogens in normally sterile clinical samples, and validating Oxford Nanopore's sequencing platform with BioMérieux's EpiSeq application for rapid infection outbreak monitoring in patient-care settings.
This partnership "marks a significant step forward for Oxford Nanopore's diagnostic roadmap and could be potentially the first of many diagnostics that we develop and manufacture using nanopore sequencing," an Oxford Nanopore spokesperson wrote in an email.