MDS PharmaServices has expanded its services in China, adding significant capacity to its existing central laboratory in Beijing.
The 25,000 sq. ft. addition to the site has given the firm a five-fold increase in testing capacity, four times the amount of space to produce clinical trial kits, and a wider range of specialised clinical trial testing services.
Specifically the new facility will specialise in molecular biology testing for infectious diseases, with a microbiology lab and flow cytometry capabilities - a technology used increasingly in oncology and immune disorders. It will also perform DNA banking and pharmacogenomics services.
Mr David Spaight, president of MDS said: "With many pharmaceutical and biotech companies now making China part of their global clinical trial programs, we recognised the need to expand our central lab operations and offer more diverse testing options."
Meanwhile, Bruker Biospin has launched a new range of fee for analytical services programme that will give customers direct access to the latest Bruker technologies for NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) FTIR (fourier transform infrared) and Raman spectroscopy.
The programme is designed to assure the highest quality service while enabling customers to minimise their infrastructure costs at their laboratory sites.
"Early service opportunities highlight our strengths in NMR, TD-NMR, and FTIR applications," said Paul Dawson, sales manager for the new Bruker Analytical Services Division.
"With demand coming from such widespread markets as pharmaceutical, biotech, petroleum industry and academia, we are expanding our capabilities every day with resources from the entire Bruker family of technologies."
In other news, Genomic services firm Expression Analysis has been chosen as the exclusive Phase I whole-genome genotyping laboratory for the Serious Adverse Events Consortium (SAEC).
The SAEC is an international collaborative effort between the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), several pharmaceutical companies and academia to identify genetic biomarkers that may predict which individuals are at risk for drug-related adverse events.
Expression Analysis will assist pharma firms in generating pre-competitive genomic data, "which should lead to safer and more efficacious drugs".
Initial studies will rely on Illumina's Human 1M DNA Analysis BeadChip, which can interrogate more than one million genetic markers per sample, said the firm.
