A Medical Device Daily

Biocrates Life Sciences (Innsbruck, Austria) said it has entered into a worldwide co-marketing agreement with Applied Biosystems (Foster City, California).

Biocrates will promote Applied Biosystems' mass spectrometers for targeted metabolomics and for use in conjunction with their AbsoluteIDQ Kits. In addition, Applied Biosystems will promote Biocrates AbsoluteIDQ Kits for targeted metabolomics in conjunction with its triple quadrupole and QTRAP series instruments.

Biocrates' AbsoluteIDQ Kit will enable research organizations, such as the Gene Analysis Centre (Munich, Germany), with an Applied Biosystems API 4000 or 4000 QTRAP system to identify and quantify over 150 metabolites across four different metabolite classes from a small (10 microliter) plasma sample in only minutes per sample.

"The AbsoluteIDQ Kit enables complex metabolomics to be done quickly and easily. It paves the way for metabolomics to become a routine science in clinical and pre-clinical R&D, and eventually in diagnostics," said J. Adamski, head of the Gene Analysis Centre at the Helmholtz Zentrum, an early-access customer of Biocrates' kits. "We are excited to work together with Biocrates and Applied Biosystems to have a complete metabolomics solution for our research."

Klaus Weinberger, chief scientific officer of Biocrates, said, "Metabolomics has been gaining ground as a critical technology for disease diagnosis and biomarker discovery. It is also being used increasingly as a tool to understand drug efficacy, pharmacodynamics, and toxicology. Metabolomics enables translational research from animals to humans because metabolites are exactly the same in different species and metabolic pathways are very similar."

The agreement between Biocrates and Applied Biosystems comes on the heels of the launch of Biocrates' AbsoluteIDQ Kit at Analytica in Munich, Germany. While the kits will initially only be available in Europe, there are plans to expand sales to the U.S. and eventually worldwide.

In other agreement news:

• CompuMed (Los Angeles) reported it has signed an agreement with Osteometer MediTech (Hawthorne, California), a subsidiary of OSI Systems (also Hawthorne), that enables CompuMed to provide a suite of bone densitometry solutions specifically aimed at the point-of-care market.

As a result of this agreement, CompuMed also announced the launch of its OsteoCare initiative, under which primary care physicians and other healthcare providers can join the OsteoCare clinical network and access an integrated suite of osteoporosis screening technologies for point-of-care use.

OsteoCare is aimed principally at primary care physicians at general practice, family practice, internal medicine and ob/gyn facilities, as well as certain specialists including rheumatologists, endocrinologists and orthopedists who provide care to patients at risk for osteoporosis.