A Diagnostics & Imaging Week
HemoSense (San Jose, California) reported signing an agreement with Laboratory Corporation of America (LabCorp; Burlington, North Carolina) to supply the HemoSense portable INRatio PT/INR monitoring system to identified LabCorp laboratories. Financial details were not disclosed.
The INRatio system will also be made available to selected LabCorp patient service centers and affiliated physician offices nationwide.
HemoSense’s INRatio system consists of a small, portable meter and disposable test strips that provide a quick measurement of blood-clotting time, known as a PT/INR value. This test helps patients reduce the risk of strokes through frequent monitoring of anticoagulation therapy.
“[T]his agreement with LabCorp is one more step toward our goal of increasing the HemoSense share of a growing market in patient blood coagulation monitoring,” said Timothy Still, executive VP and chief commercial officer of HemoSense. “Monitoring patients’ PT/INR levels at the point-of-care can help improve the treatment, health and lifestyle of patients taking warfarin.”
HemoSense’s INRatio system is designed to reduce the time and inconvenience required to manage warfarin and allows patients to play an active role in management of their warfarin dosage.
The INRatio system is based on an electrochemical technology that generates rapid PT/INR results simultaneously with two levels of quality control from a single drop of blood. Patient training is straightforward, HemoSense says, and test strips can be stored at room temperature for up to one year.
The INRatio system is sold through distributors in the U.S. and 23 other countries.
In other agreement news:
• bioM rieux (Marcy L’Etoile, France), which focuses on in vitro diagnostics, and NuGEN Technologies (San Carlos, California), a private company that develops and commercializes nucleic acid amplification and labeling systems, have formedcross-licensing intellectual property and supply agreements for NuGEN’s WT-Ovation RNA Amplification System. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The agreement gives bioM rieux non-exclusive rights to specific NuGEN amplification technologies that will enable it to create and market in vitro diagnostic (IVD) tests requiring amplification for expression analysis. In return, NuGEN will gain access to patented bioM rieux linear amplification technologies using chimeric primers, including extensive OEM rights for the research market.
As a result, NuGEN said it will be able to broaden its intellectual property portfolio in this area.
The dual accord will enable bioM rieux to integrate NuGEN technologies for the development of a sensitive and automatable microarray-based assay for cancer with the objective to increase test easy-of-use and reduce the time from sample acquisition to diagnosis.