NEW YORK – Pacific Biosciences this week announced new European headquarters in London as well as its first commercial services provider in the region. PacBio's Europe, Middle East, and Africa headquarters — slated to open next month — will house a commercial team and lab space for customer collaborations, training, and internal development projects. Switzerland's Genesupport, which provides sequencing services under the name Fasteris, will offer PacBio sequencing on a Sequel IIe.
NGeneBio said this week that it has submitted an application to Korea's Ministry of Food and Drug Safety for class III in vitro diagnostic medical device approval of its next-generation sequencing test OncoAccuPanel. NGeneBio developed the panel — which can detect microsatellite instability status, tumor mutational burden, and more than 300 cancer-associated genes — in collaboration with the Seoul Asan Medical Center and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The firm is also preparing the OncoAccuPanel for CE-IVD marking in Europe.
Cue Health said this week that it has partnered with Albertsons Companies to provide its molecular COVID-19 tests at participating pharmacies across the US. The program was piloted last fall in 40 pharmacies in Washington state and has since been rolled out to 900 pharmacies, with plans to make the tests available at most Albertsons pharmacies in the coming weeks, Cue said. Pharmacy personnel will conduct the tests and results will be delivered to customers via email.
Theradiag said this week that it recorded a loss of €767,000 ($847,000) for full-year 2021. In a statement, the French diagnostics company said that results in 2021 were affected by "exceptional expenses associated with its COVID" business "that was deployed in an opportunistic manner in 2020." Theradiag had announced it is discontinuing its COVID-19 antigen testing business and has cleared its stock of such products. Expenses associated with the COVID activities were estimated to be €500,000 in 2021. The firm previously said that its 2021 revenues grew 7 percent year over year.
HealthTrackRx this week announced the opening of a new facility in Marietta, Georgia. Called HealthTrackRx of Georgia, the lab will serve the Atlanta area and offer a comprehensive menu of PCR-based infectious disease tests, with results delivered the next morning. The firm said it plans to open additional facilities in key markets throughout the US as part of its efforts to make next-day PCR results the standard of care for chronic and acute infection detection.
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.