PathoQuest, a rapidly growing biotechnology company spun out from Institut Pasteur, has announced a preferred partnership with Charles River Laboratories, an early-stage CRO, to provide an improved Viral Safety Service offering to biopharmaceutical companies. While traditional molecular approaches to safety testing are limited to the identification of a limited, predefined list of viruses, the PathoQuest’s next generation sequencing (NGS) solution combines a proprietary curated virus database with an automated analysis pipeline. This provides a universal test for identifying viruses of any type in a single, comprehensive analysis that minimizes false negatives.

“We are very pleased to enter into this partnership with PathoQuest and look forward to offering this unique NGS-based testing solution to our customers,” stated Horst Ruppach, global director, Viral Clearance and Virology at Charles River Laboratories. “We believe this advanced viral safety testing solution is an important supplement to ensuring the safety of biological products produced by the biopharmaceutical industry.”

“Charles River’s global footprint and extensive experience in biologics testing opens a great opportunity for biopharmaceutical companies to access our NGS-based solutions,” said Jean-François BREPSON, president and CEO of PathoQuest. “In a challenging regulatory environment, we anticipate that PathoQuest’s NGS-based viral safety test will become the new gold standard in biosafety assessment.”

With this partnership agreement, PathoQuest demonstrates its unique know-how and expertise in the field of pathogen identification with a fully-integrated, NGS-based metagenomics process for identifying pathogens from biological specimens and samples and the delivery of an actionable report.

In the wake of viral contaminants of several high-profile marketed biological products, the biopharmaceutical industry is increasingly looking for improved methods for viral safety testing of biological products such as monoclonal antibodies or vaccines.