NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Advanced Biological Laboratories today announced it has signed an agreement with University Hospitals Case Medical Center to collaborate on designing and validating a next-generation sequencing assay to detect drug resistance in HIV patients.
As part of the agreement, University Hospitals will use ABL's DeepChek software to analyze Deepgen HIV, a diagnostic test developed at Case Western Reserve University.
Last July University Hospitals said that Arup Laboratories will market Deepgene HIV nationally.
"Deepgen HIV is now the primary HIV genotyping assay used by HIV physicians at the Case Western Reserve University/University Hospitals AIDS Clinical Trials Unit, and it is being distributed nationally by a major clinical laboratory," Miguel Quinones-Mateu, scientific director at the University Hospitals' Translational Laboratory and an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, said in a statement. "This agreement with ABL will expedite the use of this innovative and highly sensitive assay worldwide."
Combined with DeepChek, the test will help clinicians assess the performance of anti-retroviral treatment by using deep genetic sequencing to monitor the virus for drug resistance and the ability to infect different cells in the body.
It will also provide a platform for HIV physicians and researchers, both in academia and industry, to detect minority variants of the virus at sensitivities unimaginable with standard HIV genotypic tests based on Sanger sequencing, ABL said in a statement.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.