FIND & Qiagen intensify partnership to accelerate innovative TB tests

Geneva, Switzerland – 28 July 2015 – FIND and QIAGEN have signed a five-year memorandum of understanding to formalize their partnership to advance diagnostics for tuberculosis. The partnership spans three areas: tests to enable targeted preventive therapy, tests to detect drug resistance at the point of care, and sequencing as a future gold standard in TB surveillance and regimen selection.

The partners will work together on the development of improved tests to detect those patients with latent TB who are at risk of active TB. An important first step has already been taken in developing definition and trialing standards to evaluate tests that are able to detect latent to active disease progression, which will benefit the evaluation of the QuantiFERON-TB Gold Plus from QIAGEN.

The partnership will also support the development of new tests to detect resistance to important components of new TB drug regimens. As part of its collaboration with QIAGEN, FIND will also provide access to its biobank of TB specimens to facilitate the evaluation of new tests for TB and multidrug-resistant TB.

“QIAGEN is the leading global provider of diagnostics for the detection of latent TB infections,” said Dr Catharina Boehme, CEO of FIND. “We are pleased to intensify our partnership in the fight against TB as a first step and hope to expand to other disease areas going forward.”

“We are very proud to partner with FIND in the worldwide fight against tuberculosis and to develop together innovative and affordable diagnostics ranging from latent TB detection to tests for drug resistance mechanism,” said Thierry Bernard, Senior Vice President Head of the Molecular Diagnostics Business Area and member of the Executive Committee of QIAGEN.

Other projects under discussion include: the development and validation of a user interface, software and algorithms for the interpretation of TB sequence data; and the selection of genomic targets for TB case detection.

About FIND
FIND was established in 2003 as a global non-profit dedicated to accelerating the development, evaluation and delivery of high-quality, affordable diagnostic tests for diseases of poverty, including tuberculosis, malaria, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, sleeping sickness, hepatitis C, leishmaniasis, Chagas disease and Buruli ulcer. Over the last decade, FIND has partnered in the delivery of 11 new diagnostic tools and created an enabling environment for countless more through specimen banks, reagent development and better market visibility. FIND has also supported the scale-up of access to new diagnostic through implementation, quality assurance and lab strengthening work. FIND has over 100 partners, including research institutes and laboratories, ministries of health and national disease control programmes, commercial partners, bilateral and multilateral organizations, especially WHO, and clinical trial sites.

About QIAGEN
QIAGEN N.V., a Netherlands-based holding company, is the leading global provider of Sample to Insight solutions to transform biological materials into valuable molecular insights. QIAGEN sample technologies isolate and process DNA, RNA and proteins from blood, tissue and other materials. Assay technologies make these biomolecules visible and ready for analysis. Bioinformatics software and knowledge bases interpret data to report relevant, actionable insights. Automation solutions tie these together in seamless and cost-effective molecular testing workflows. QIAGEN provides these workflows to more than 500,000 customers around the world in Molecular Diagnostics (human healthcare), Applied Testing (forensics, veterinary testing and food safety), Pharma (pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies) and Academia (life sciences research). As of March 31, 2015, QIAGEN employed approximately 4,300 people in over 35 locations worldwide. Further information can be found at http://www.qiagen.com