NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Thermo Fisher Scientific announced today a collaboration with researchers in Japan and Sweden to establish a biomarker research center in Tokyo.
The collaboration brings together Thermo Fisher's Biomarker Research Initiatives in Mass Spectrometry, or BRIMS, Center; Toshide Nishimura, at Tokyo Medical University Hospital; and Gyorgy Marko-Varga, a professor at Tokyo Medical University and at Lund University in Sweden, and senior Drug, Discovery/Development scientist at AstraZeneca.
The goal is to create the Tokyo Biomarker Research Center to focus on biomarker discovery and quantification, disease mechanisms, therapeutic drug monitoring, and disease pathophysiology, Thermo Fisher said in a statement.
It added that it hopes to bring to the collaboration its expertise in mass spectrometry-based assays, workflow development, technology integration, and a network of collaborators doing similar work.
According to Murray Wigmore, senior director of commercial operations in Japan for Thermo Fisher, the Tokyo Biomarker Research Center will be developed as the model to replicate BRIMS in international markets.
Work at the center will be done to correlate protein expression and quantitative regulation for diseases of key concern in Japan, such as lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and cardiovascular disease. The goal is to find candidate biomarkers related to drug response.
The Japanese center will have dedicated laboratories at Tokyo Medical and house an archive with comprehensive tissue and blood sample collections, as well as access to complementary clinical and demographic data, Thermo Fisher said. The archive will include samples from drug responders and non-responders, and materials from clinical studies conducted in Europe.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.