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Phadia Makes More Advances In Personalized Medicine

Phadia, the drug development firm with its headquarters in Uppsala, Sweden and research operations in Kalamazoo County's Portage, Monday announced new services to help the pharmaceutical industry maximize the safety and effectiveness of its biopharmaceutical drug development investments.

Immune Response Diagnostics from Phadia encompasses all three components of the ImmunoCAP technology platform: the automated high throughput lab system family, the Multiplexing ImmunoCAP ISAC technology, as well as the Point-of-Care technology ImmunoCAP Rapid.

ImmunoCAP is the world's leading allergy blood test and recognized as the gold standard in specific IgE antibody testing. The proven sensitivity and specificity of ImmunoCAP provides the ideal methodology to assess the likelihood of protein-based therapies to produce an immune response in patients.

Phadia will work with its pharmaceutical industry partners to identify biomarkers and phenotypes present in patients who respond to drug therapy, and to develop tests that ensure these drugs are prescribed to patients where they will have the most significant clinical impact.

Phadia's global presence in more than 3,000 laboratories around the world, its long regulatory experience, and its strictest commitment to the quality of its diagnostics makes it an invaluable partner for these therapeutic areas.

With companion diagnostics, Phadia is providing drug development teams with the ability to tailor their therapies to identify and target specific patient groups in respiratory and autoimmune diseases. Phadia will work with its pharmaceutical industry partners to identify biomarkers and phenotypes present in patients who respond to drug therapy, and to develop tests that ensure these drugs are prescribed to patients where they will have the most significant clinical impact. Phadia's global presence in more than three thousand laboratories around the world, its long regulatory experience, and its strictest commitment to the quality of its diagnostics makes it an invaluable partner for these therapeutic areas.

"Phadia is the leader in providing cutting-edge technologies to identify the immune responses in allergies and autoimmune diseases in patients," said Hans Johansson, vice president of Phadia AB and head of Phadia's development business. "Now, these technologies are being made available to help pharmaceutical companies identify the same type of immune responses to protein-based drug therapies. We have done significant development work with our partners in the pharmaceutical industry, and the early results are good. Our first application was to work with one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies to screen patients for a potential reaction to one of their drugs. This initiative demonstrated our technology has significant value and application beyond its use in the diagnosis of allergy and autoimmune disease."

Immune Response Diagnostics is directly aligned with current trends in health care, including the use of more targeted therapies, personalized medicine, and evidence based medicine. The new initiative represents a return to its roots for Phadia, which was originally founded in 1971 as the diagnostics arm of Pharmacia, the Swedish pharmaceutical company. Since 2007 the company has been owned by Cinven, a leading European buyout firm.

For more information, visit www.phadia.com.

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