Strategic Alliances Promote Test Access and Development

In the early months of 2017, the diagnostic industry has seen several strategic alliances develop.

Among the most active companies in February so far is Quest Diagnostics which cut a deal to secure its physician clients access to Veracyte’s Affirma Gene Expression Classifier non-invasive test for diagnosing thyroid cancer and expanded its hospital partnership network to include New York City’s Montefiore Health System. For more news about Veracyte see “Industry Newsmaker: Veracyte, Inc. Scores Big with Percepta and Affirma GEC,” Laboratory Industry Report, Feb. 28, 2017.

Thermo Fisher was also busy starting the month by expanding its year-old deal with Invivoscribe Technologies to co-develop oncology tests for its Ion PGM Dx System to include in vitro assays for the TF Applied Systems Biosystems 3500Dx Genetic Analyzer. A week later, the biotech firm announced a similar deal with Asuragen to co-develop diagnostic kits for the 3500Dx CS2 instrument. Following a busy January (See Diagnostic Deals, Laboratory Industry Report, Jan. 23, 2017), Illumina stayed active announcing a new collaboration with Invivoscribe aimed at developing new in vitro diagnostic assays for the former’s MiSeqDx next generation sequencing platform for the US market.

Trend-wise, collaborations are pairing diagnostics companies with big pharma firms to develop new drug diagnoses and treatments, such as:

• Perthera’s collaboration with Novartis to identify breast and lung cancer patients for pharmaceutical clinical trials;
• The collaboration between Exosome Diagnostics and Merck KgaA on oncology drug development; and
• GenomeDx Biosciences agreement with Astella using the former’s genomic profiling tumor technology to identify patients who are candidates to use the latter’s XTANDI prostate cancer drug.

For a roundup of recent key mergers, acquisitions, alliances, licenses and other strategic transactions see “Diagnostic Deals” in the February issue of Laboratory Industry Report.