NEOMED-LABS and Public Health England Announce a Strategic Agreement

LAVAL, QC and PORTON, United Kingdom, June 27, 2019 /PRNewswire/ - NEOMED-LABS and Public Health England's (PHE) National Infection Service are pleased to announce that they have entered into a strategic partnership to engage in the improvement of global human health. This partnership is focused on vaccine projects with the objective of jointly developing new pre-clinical and clinical assays to support R&D and clinical biopharmaceutical teams in fields such as infectious disease vaccines and immunotherapies.

Although vaccines have fundamentally changed modern medicine, there are still significant challenges to implementing new technologies and expanding expertise to support vaccines development. This agreement allows for the mutual development and transfer of pre-clinical and clinical testing to support a wide range of service offerings to clients. Through joint efforts and expertise, the main objective is to build a universal program to support prophylactic and therapeutic vaccine development from pre-clinical to post-licensure in different fields, including seasonal/pandemic, pediatric and emergent diseases. This collaboration builds on PHE's unique expertise in high-consequence infectious diseases, BSL3, BSL4 and GMP GXP lab services and NEOMED-LABS' capabilities in high-throughput clinical testing.

NEOMED-LABS and PHE's Vaccine Research Groups led by Dr Bassam Hallis have engaged in a collaboration targeting Influenza and Zika aiming at assessing concomitant vaccine responses and are committed to initiating a minimum of three additional collaborative projects before the end of 2019.

"We are thrilled at the prospects opened by this strategic partnership with a venerable and admired institution and the initiation of our collaboration with a team led by such a recognized key opinion leader in the vaccine field. This partnership was made in recognition of PHE's continued advancement of vaccine research for the development of counter measures against emerging and re-emerging diseases. It will give the opportunity for NEOMED-LABS to have a collaborator in Europe and to further expand its offerings, capabilities and coverage.", said Dr Benoit Bouche, NEOMED-LABS President and Chief Executive Officer.

"We have great synergy and complementarity, in terms of our expertise.  The ability of NEOMED-LABS to provide high-throughput testing expertise alongside PHE's capabilities in assay development and validation will advance research and development of these needed vaccines to impact human health at a global level.", said Dr Bassam Hallis.

ABOUT NEOMED-LABS

NEOMED-LABS is a leading assay development and specialty clinical laboratory CRO whose versatile team of scientists and technology platforms were instrumental in the development, qualification, validation, and large-scale sample testing of assays that supported the FDA filing of almost 100 new molecular entities, including blockbuster vaccines and soluble large molecules. We proudly provide superior services and unrivaled expertise in immunology based on a client-centric team approach and expedited development time.

For more information, please visit: www.neomedlabs.com / www.pacbio.com

ABOUT PUBLIC HEALTH ENGLAND

PHE exists to protect and improve the nation's health and wellbeing, and reduce health inequalities. It does this through advocacy, partnerships, world-class science, knowledge and intelligence, and the delivery of specialist public health services. PHE is an operationally autonomous executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care.

For more information on PHE visit www.gov.uk/phe or follow us on Twitter @PHE_uk

SOURCE NEOMED-LABS