Almac Group’s Diagnostics Business Unit has opened a new companion diagnostic development facility located in the Research Triangle Park region of North Carolina. The North Carolina facility will provide a U.S. base to support Almac’s increased demand for its CDx development partnerships as well as a CLIA-accredited laboratory to support the downstream delivery of assays for patient testing.

Along with headquarters in Europe and partnerships in Asia, the new facility in the U.S. will provide Almac Diagnostics with a strong global presence to continue to meet increasing customer demand and to support their growing client base.

The custom designed facility is located amongst one of the most prominent high-tech research and development centers in the world and contains molecular biology laboratories as well as office space. The state of the art laboratory is equipped with microarray and qPCR platforms appropriate for companion diagnostic development and will operate both research-use-only and clinical diagnostic tests. Plans are also in place to add additional technology platforms including NGS in the coming year.

‘The opening of our new CDx facility in the U.S. is Almac Diagnostics’ latest initiative to better serve our global Biopharma partners. As we experience increased client demand for our companion diagnostic development services, this latest expansion will significantly enhance Almac’s offering, increasing capacity and further demonstrating our commitment to personalized healthcare’ said Professor Paul Harkin, president and managing director of Almac Diagnostics.

The Almac Group is an established contract development and manufacturing organization that provides an extensive range of integrated services to over 600 companies globally within the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors. The services range from R&D, biomarker discovery and development, API manufacture, formulation development, clinical trial supply, IXRS® technology (IVRS/IWRS) through to commercial-scale manufacture.

The international company is a privately owned organization that has organically grown over 40 years and now employs in excess of 4,000 highly skilled personnel. Almac is headquartered in Craigavon, Northern Ireland with operations across the U.S. (Pennsylvania, North Carolina and California) and in Asia (Singapore and Tokyo).