Clearstone Central Laboratories and Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings (LabCorp) have entered into a global collaboration offering “seamless access” to College of American Pathology (CAP)-accredited central laboratories in Belgium, Canada, China, France, Singapore and the US.
The strategic collaboration, which will operate through LabCorp’s Esoterix Clinical Trials Services division, widens the US company’s global reach by allowing clients to tap into Clearstone’s global laboratory network, which includes sites in China, France, Singapore and Canada.
LabCorp also gets access to Clearstone’s central laboratory protocol management system, APOLLO CLPM, while Clearstone clients will benefit from LabCorp’s speciality testing capabilities and leading assay portfolio, creating “the largest combined assay portfolio in the industry, with much greater speciality and biomarker testing capabilities”, the new partners said.
LabCorp’s clinical assay portfolio ranges from routine blood analyses to HIV and genomic testing. Based in Burlington, US, the company describes itself as a pioneer in commercialising new diagnostic technologies and the first company in its sector to embrace genomic testing.
Clearstone manages a global workforce of 500 from headquarters in Toronto, Canada. Claiming to be “the largest and most experienced private company exclusively focused on providing central lab services to support late-stage drug development with accurate and timely test data”, it runs wholly-owned CAP-accredited laboratories and kit production facilities in Beijing (China), Hamburg (Germany), Paris (France), Singapore and Toronto.
The overarching goal of the collaboration is to deliver “expert safety, diagnostic and speciality testing services in support of drug development and clinical trials”, the companies explained.
According to Lewis Cameron, chief executive officer of Clearstone, the tie-up provides “one of the most advanced scientific portfolios in the central lab market, with globally harmonised and state-of-the-art testing platforms in areas such as pharmacogenomics, microbiology, immunohistochemistry, allergy testing, cytogenetics and flow cytometry”.
