Partnerships in healthcare have never been more important. Through collaboration, industry specialists are increasingly bringing cutting-edge medical innovations and life-changing treatments to patients globally.
In this podcast, Paul Beresford, Vice President and General Manager of Companion Diagnostics (CDx), and Lou Welebob, Vice President and General Manager of Pathology at Agilent Technologies discuss the merits of deepening cooperation with pharmaceutical companies.
Discussions center around tissue diagnostics using immunohistochemistry (IHC). Here, it is highlighted that the goal is to help pharma speed up the drug approval process and bring the right therapeutic to the right patient at the right time. To help pharma speed up this process, Agilent will be launching the BioPharma Services Lab (BPSL) to streamline assay development and clinical testing needs.
Agilent Technologies’ Biopharma partnerships are touched upon. Agilent has built a very strong relationship with Merck, and as a result of working together to bring a drug and a companion diagnostic to market, they have tested more than five million patients, for example.
Beresford and Welebob also outline how they see partnerships playing a defining role in shaping the company’s future, enabling it to broaden its technological focus on immunohistochemistry such as bridging into digital biology and imaging as well as multiplexing.
In the case of multiplexing, it is explained that running multiple markers on a single tissue sample will massively enrich result data, enhance patient insights, and potentially speed the time to treatment.
Spatial biology is also discussed, specifically looking at how cell proximity within the tumor microenvironment can potentially be correlated to higher drug efficacy.
Looking ahead, both speakers point to the role that machine learning will play in allowing the medical industry to unlock the promise of digital pathology for precision medicine. This includes highlighting the potential to use algorithms in the actual development of assays across laboratories globally.
To discover more about each of these unique areas of innovation, listen to the full podcast.
D0043242_1.00