Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics and Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc have expanded their global joint marketing agreement in which Bio-Rad will provide its quality control (QC) products and Unity™ data management solutions for Siemens’ IMMULITE® Immunoassay, Dimension® Integrated Chemistry, and Dimension Vista® Intelligent Lab systems. This move extends clinical laboratories’ access to Bio-Rad’s consistent control product and data management tools within the Siemens clinical laboratory systems portfolio which, were previously only available through Siemens’ ADVIA® Chemistry and ADVIA Centaur® Immunoassay systems.
Through this agreement, laboratories using Bio-Rad controls and Siemens proprietary-labeled controls on Siemens immunoassay and chemistry systems can participate in Bio-Rad’s comprehensive Unity Interlaboratory Program. Bio-Rad’s Unity software products offer varying levels of functionality, ranging from basic Internet-based data submission to advanced real-time QC data management, rules evaluation and analysis.
This joint marketing agreement is the result of a quantitative market research conducted by Siemens in which the company discovered that 80% of laboratories ranked improvement of QC data management and the need for multi-analyte controls to perform QC as either extremely important or very important. The research was conducted among nearly 400 hospital and private laboratories in the United States, Japan and five European countries in an effort to better understand their QC control and management needs.
Additionally, the two companies have also signed an agreement whereby Bio-Rad will support new Siemens assays through the addition of new analytes or new control products to Bio-Rad’s high quality line of independent third-party controls. Siemens has a comprehensive assay pipeline that will now have consistent control materials for optimal reliability of test results.
Source: Siemens Healthcare
