NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – PathoQuest announced today that it has signed an agreement to provide access to a next-generation sequencing-based viral safety testing service through contract research firm Charles River Laboratories.
Under the terms of the deal, Charles River Laboratories will offer its biopharmaceutical customers PathoQuest's service, which combines a proprietary curated virus database with an automatic analysis pipeline to identify viral contaminants in biological products. Additional terms of the arrangement were not disclosed.
"We believe this advanced viral safety testing solution is an important supplement to ensuring the safety of biological products produced by the biopharmaceutical industry," Horst Ruppach, global director of viral clearance and virology at Charles River Laboratories, said in a statement.
PathoQuest President and CEO Jean-Francois Brepson added that the partnership "opens a great opportunity for biopharmaceutical companies to access our NGS-based solutions. In a challenging regulatory environment, we anticipate that PathoQuest's NGS-based viral safety test will become the new gold standard in biosafety assessment."