A Diagnostics & Imaging Week

Abbott (Abbott Park, Illinois) and Medica (Bedford, Massachusetts) reported that they have entered into an exclusive agreement for the worldwide commercialization of the Cell-Dyn EasyCell digital cell morphology system for use in hospitals and clinical laboratories. This system automates the location of white blood cells on a stained blood film and pre-classifies them, improving the efficiency of the lab.

Medica will manufacture the system, and Abbott will have exclusive distribution rights under the Cell-Dyn EasyCell brand name. Abbott will be responsible for the system’s sales, marketing and customer support.

“This agreement with Medica complements the current Cell-Dyn instrument portfolio and demonstrates Abbott’s continuing commitment to provide innovative products that increase the laboratory’s productivity and efficiency,” said John Mooradian, divisional VP and general manager, Abbott Hematology.

Medica develops in vitro diagnostic products for hospitals and clinical laboratories for electrolytes, blood gas, hematology and clinical chemistry. Abbott develops pharmaceuticals and medical products, including nutritionals, devices and diagnostics.

In other agreements: HistoRx (New Haven, California) reported that it has entered into a research collaboration with the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG; Philadelphia), a National Cancer Institute (Bethesda, Maryland)-funded clinical cooperative group.

HistoRx will provide RTOG researchers access to HistoRx’s AQUA (Automated Quantitative Analysis) technology for biomarker analysis and will develop customized immunohistochemical assays to be used by RTOG in investigating the relationship between specific protein biomarkers and clinical responsiveness in brain tumor patients.

HistoRx said it intends to commercialize assays and reagents developed in the course of the collaboration for clinical use as predictive diagnostics.

The RTOG studies will use a combination of high-throughput tissue microarrays, multiplex analysis, and AQUA analysis-based assays to determine whether brain tumor patients are likely to respond to a specific targeted therapy and whether the biomarkers under investigation may be used to predict survival.

“We selected HistoRx’s AQUA technology based on its unique ability to measure protein biomarker expression and localization in diseased tissue sections in a precisely quantitative, reproducible, and standardized way,” said Arnab Chakravarti, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston) and a member of the RTOG Translational Research Program. “By eliminating the subjective interpretation inherent in conventional qualitative immunohistochemical analysis, we expect this collaboration will provide a substantial boost to our research in brain cancer by enabling RTOG researchers to reveal stronger, more reliable statistical correlations linking protein biomarker expression with prediction of patient response to therapy and disease outcome.”

“As the relationship between protein expression patterns and disease gains an expanding role in new drug and diagnostic development and in the way physicians treat patients and individualize therapeutic regimens, we continue to advance our goal of replacing conventional immunohistochemistry with AQUA analysis, a more precise and consistent tool that is enabling pathologists and clinicians to integrate data from predictive biomarker studies confidently into research, diagnosis, and patient treatment,” said Rana Gupta, CEO of HistoRx.

The company said that the AQUA technology is the first platform capable of measuring biomarker concentration with subcellular resolution to generate more precise, efficient answers about the safety and effectiveness of new therapeutics in development and to enable development of companion diagnostic tests for targeted therapies.

RTOG is a multi-institutional international clinical cooperative group. It has more than 35 years of experience in conducting clinical trials and is comprised of more than 280 major research institutions in the U.S. and Canada. The group currently is conducting more than 40 active studies that involve radiation therapy alone or in conjunction with surgery and/or chemotherapeutic drugs or which investigate quality of life issues and their effects on the cancer patient.