WALTHAM, Mass.—PerkinElmer Inc. has announced the completion of its acquisition of Swedish company Vanadis Diagnostics, AB, which is developing a novel solution for non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) based on the digital analysis of cell-free DNA.
"We founded Vanadis with the mission to make NIPT available to all women, and we developed this technology to fundamentally change the cost structure and workflow for NIPT," Olle Ericsson, CEO of Vanadis Diagnostics, remarked in a press release. "We are confident that with its leading position in prenatal screening, PerkinElmer is best situated to bring this system to market and address the under-served segment of average-risk pregnancies."
PerkinElmer's diagnostic offerings currently include: prenatal, neonatal and infectious disease screening, along with molecular diagnostics solutions, through a wide range of instruments, reagents and assay platforms, and software. In addition, PerkinElmer also provides private cord blood and cord tissue preservation to families through ViaCord LLC. The acquisition of Vanadis is expected to improve PerkinElmer's existing maternal fetal health offerings, which include a full portfolio of traditional serum screening solutions, by enabling improved detection of fetal chromosomal abnormalities with a cost-effective, high-throughput approach.
"While NIPT is becoming increasingly recognized as valuable to many high-risk expectant parents during the first trimester, test complexity and pricing issues have limited the ability of many biochemistry labs to effectively offer this type of prenatal screening," Prahlad Singh, president of Diagnostics at PerkinElmer, commented in a statement. "High capital investment, advanced molecular skills and complex data handling for lab staff, along with the difficulty of integrating these systems into the existing screening infrastructure, have been barriers to more widespread adoption of NIPT. Vanadis' simplified NIPT platform, once available, should help overcome these obstacles, giving labs a wider range of prenatal testing capabilities and providing important information to physicians and patients."
In other recent expansions to its portfolio, PerkinElmer introduced several new solutions at this year's SLAS conference. Among them are the Operetta CLS High-content Analysis System and Columbus Software. As the company explained in a press release, “The Operetta CLS system enables scientists to gain deep biological insight into disease from common assays and complex applications using advanced cellular models, and to identify even subtle phenotypic changes through sensitive imaging and intuitive data analysis. Speed, sensitivity and high resolution are achieved through the unique combination of automated water immersion objectives that deliver better quality image data, stable LED illumination, true confocal optics and a sensitive, high resolution sCMOS camera.” When combined with the updated Columbus software, scientists have “an enhanced, integrated solution for high-content imaging experiments, from instrument image data import to data analysis. The Columbus system accelerates discovery by enabling scientists to automate triggering of batch image analysis.”
The JANUS G3 Automated Liquid Handling Workstations, LANCE Ultra TR-FRET Assay Kits and Chemagic 360 instrument were also introduced for increased capabilities in analysis and drug discovery.
SOURCE: PerkinElmer press release
