NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Guardant Health this week opened its Asia, Middle East, and Africa headquarters in Singapore, which it said will scale commercialization of the firm's Guardant360 liquid biopsy assay in the region. It is currently offering the test to clinical customers in the region to assist with treatment selection for patients with advanced cancers. According to Guardant, it has already established distributorships in Southeast Asia, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, New Zealand, the Middle East, and Israel.
CareDx announced this week that it has prepaid its outstanding debt in full. The debt — a $15 million term loan from Perceptive Advisors — was obtained on April 13, had an interest rate of 9 percent plus the greater of LIBOR or 1.5 percent, an interest-only period of three years, and a maturity date of April 2023. In addition to the $15 million debt prepayment, the company also paid Perceptive Advisors a prepayment premium and an exit fee. The firm had cash and cash equivalents approximately $62 million after the payments.
In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission this week, GenMark Diagnostics said that on Nov. 29, it entered into a seventh amendment to its loan and security agreement with its lender, Solar Senior Capital, under which the diagnostics firm borrowed about $7.1 million in additional funding through a new term loan. GenMark said that the loan is subject to the same interest-only period, final maturity date, interest rate calculation, and other terms and conditions as the other term loans made available to GenMark under its agreement with the lender.
CANARIE, the digital infrastructure manager for Canada's research and education communities, said this week that it is funding software development for nine National Data Services in fields including genomics through its Research Data Management Program. In genomics, this service will be built on CanDIG, the Canadian Distributed Infrastructure for Genomics, which provides a national platform for enabling large-scale genomic analyses across private datasets controlled by local institutions. The new funding will allow support for a broader range of new data types, such as RNA sequencing and expression data, as well as more automation and more access and quality controls. The new set of services are called CHORD, Canadian Health 'Omics Repository, Distributed.
Oncimmune said this week that it has reached a deal with Multiplan to expand access to Oncimmune’s EarlyCDT-Lung test, a blood-based test for clinicians to assess malignancy in indeterminate pulmonary nodules. Multiplan has contracts with 900,000 healthcare providers, and about 57 million consumers have access to Multiplan's network products.
Biomerica said this week it has signed a three-year deal with Medline Industries to distribute Biomerica's EZ Detect screening test for early warning signs of colorectal cancer. Other financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Medline, which has 1,600 direct sales representatives, manufactures and distributes medical supplies. EZ Detect is an at-home test to detect fecal occult blood.
OncoDNA said this week that it has received ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification for its information security management and storage. The certification, which involved an audit by an accredited body to demonstrate the ability to protect the privacy of customer data, includes the company's IT infrastructure where data is stored and processed.
In Brief This Week is a selection of news items that may be of interest to our readers but had not previously appeared on GenomeWeb.