Oxford Nanopore and bioMérieux announced that they have teamed up to explore bringing nanopore sequencing to the infectious disease diagnostics market.

The companies aim to advance patient care by providing access to nanopore-based clinical research and in vitro diagnostic solutions.

Initial areas of collaboration will include a test for determining antibiotic resistance of tuberculosis, an assay to identify pathogens in normally sterile clinical samples, and validating Oxford Nanopore’s sequencing platform with the bioMérieux Episeq CS application for rapid infection outbreak monitoring in patient-care settings.

Oxford Nanopore officials said the partnership will allow their company to “offer rapid and accurate identification of pathogens and associated antimicrobial resistance, at scale, and better equip the specialists for whom speed and access to comprehensive data is key.”

bioMérieux officials noted that the partnership allows their company to explore new technologies that hold promise to improve diagnostics and patient care, such as sequencing.

DEVYSER DIAGNOSTICS, THERMO FISHER TARGET POST-TRANSPLANT MARKET

An agreement between Devyser Diagnostics AB and Thermo Fisher Scientific gives Thermo Fisher exclusive rights to commercialize, under combined brands, Devyser’s post-transplant portfolio of next-generation sequencing (NGS) products in North America and Europe, the companies announced.

Devyser retains the rights to commercialize its post-transplant products in the U.S. via its own service laboratory in Sweden, as a service to U.S. laboratories. Devyser will also continue to manufacture all products.

Devyser officials said the agreement will give clinical labs, clinicians, and patients in the U.S., Canada, and Europe broad and fast access to Devyser´s NGS-based products for post-transplant monitoring. The agreement also serves as a quality stamp for the company and its products.

Thermo Fisher’s position in the U.S. and European markets and commercial infrastructure and resources benefit Devyser, while Devyser’s sensitive assays and streamlined work process give labs the ability to provide faster results.

The company’s post-transplant products are pending In Vitro Diagnostic Medical Devices regulation certification for the European market, Devyser officials added.

Thermo Fisher officials said Devyser’s post-transplant NGS offerings are unique and complement their existing, One Lambda-branded products and support better patient outcomes.

The transplantation market is growing rapidly due to a growing older population and higher incidence of relevant diseases. There is a shortage of organs globally and many patients are currently on waiting lists for new organs, the companies noted.

QUEST DIAGNOSTICS TO ACQUIRE HAYSTACK ONCOLOGY

Quest Diagnostics and Haystack Oncology recently announced an agreement for Quest to acquire Haystack.

Founded in 2021, Haystack has developed a circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA)-based technology specifically for minimal residual disease detection (MRD), after 20 years of research and development. MRD tests detect ctDNA in the bloodstream of patients following cancer surgery and treatment.

Published research demonstrated an earlier version of the Haystack technology’s ability to better

identify patients with residual disease for adjuvant chemotherapy after surgery for stage II colon cancer, thereby reducing chemotherapy use in the overall patient population without compromising recurrence-free survival.

When the acquisition closes, Quest expects to adapt the MRD test developed at Haystack as the basis for new clinical lab services available beginning in 2024. Development efforts will focus initially on MRD tests for colorectal, breast, and lung cancers.

Quest Diagnostics officials said that Haystack's liquid biopsy technology, combined with Quest's strengths in screening, pathology, and sequencing, will leverage Quest's expertise and scale in oncology, genomics, and pathology and position Quest to lead in the fast-growing MRD category.

SPIN-OFF OFFERS POINT-OF-CARE PCR TEST

Curative recently announced the spin-off of Sensible Diagnostics, which aims to commercialize a point-of-care PCR testing platform.

Its Sensible PCR platform is designed to support Curative’s legacy next-generation testing operations as an easy drop-in upgrade for current point-of-care testing workflows. Results are ready in 10 minutes, according to the companies.

With prices that are competitive with lateral flow antigen testing and a design that requires fewer process steps, Sensible Diagnostics’ platform is setting out “to make lateral flow immunoassay testing a thing of the past,” the companies said.

They added that the platform would be launched with a respiratory test designed to extend to all types of infectious disease testing.

Sensible Diagnostics and its point-of-care testing platform came to fruition out of Curative’s COVID-19 testing business. Curative is no longer in the diagnostic testing business and is currently offering a health insurance plan in Texas.

MAYO INKS SPATIAL BIOLOGY DEAL

Alpenglow Biosciences recently announced a collaboration with Mayo Clinic to use Alpenglow’s 3D spatial biology platform to accelerate drug development and advance clinical diagnostics.

Alpenglow’s end-to-end 3D spatial biology solution includes patented high-throughput 3D imaging, cloud-based bioinformatics pipelines, andartificial intelligence (AI)-powered spatial analysis.

Recent research has applied Alpenglow’s 3D spatial biology platform to analyze human lung cancer samples from patients treated with immunotherapy, revealing novel 3D spatial insights that the team aims to correlate with treatment response.

Alpenglow officials said that while tissue contains insights into disease processes and therapeutic mechanisms of action, slide-based pathology misses most of that information. Alpenglow’s technology uncovers the missing information by digitizing entire tissues down to sub-cellular resolution and can generate insights about it with AI.

Mayo officials said they will integrate Alpenglow’s 3D spatial biology platform with mutliomics approaches including multiplex immunofluorescence and single-cell sequencing to predict response to therapy and patient prognosis using Mayo’s biospecimen repositories.