Interesting news snippet ... from Yahoo msg board - Bold & Underlining are by me.
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From Quests conference call
Kevin Ellich – RBC Capital Markets
Thinking about your relationships with some of the small diagnostic testing companies like Vermillion and the launch of OVA1 actually could you give us some color and detail behind what’s going with OVA1 launch when its expected? What other diagnostic testing categories you’re interested in or looking at?
Surya Mohapatra
Let me first start with the diagnostic category, we are focusing on pre-diagnostic areas infectious disease, cardiovascular disease and cancer diagnostics. One of the major reasons for acquisition of AmeriPath that we want to be the destination for cancer patients when it comes to cancer diagnostics so that’s going on as well as far as integration is concerned. Now we are working with other companies whether it is Vermillion or whether it is other companies where we are bringing in new gene-based testing. Some of these companies were for years and we are very excited that Vermillion is come up with OVA1 and we’re going to introduce it this quarter.
As far as going forward you heard the same thing about Epigenomics as far as ColoVantage, colorectal cancer you will see us more and more doing gene-based and esoteric testing whether it’s for personalized medicine or whether it is just medicine to improve specificity and sensitivity almost all aspects of cancer
Tom Gallucci – Lazard Capital Markets
You mentioned pathology along with gene-based and esoteric as important areas. We’ve been seeing and hearing for a long time about a shift toward more in house operations. Can you give us an update on what your thoughts are on the pathology landscape generally?
Surya Mohapatra
As you know, over the last five or six years, every year very disciplined way we are growing, now we have 800 MDs in the company. We have a number of specialists whether it is pathology or it is humanopathology. Once you build this what I call the brain power, our doctors are seeing more patients a day then some of the hospitals. One of the questions I ask the companies, who is looking at your slides? This is our really great, great strength and we want to really leverage.
Another way of leveraging is really to combining clinical pathology and anatomic pathology and molecular diagnostics and you’re seeing some of these results and obviously people talk about personalized medicine, that’s what we’re doing. Once we combine with the digital pathology we think this is going to really give us a really unique advantage to really move forward.
We see some in-sourcing in the hospitals and people are trying to do what I call the individual analysis that where you see some decrease in the anatomic pathology in the tissue. I don’t think it’s a long term trend because people are going to really come to us for more then just the tissue.
Bob Hagemann
You’ll see out on our website that the anatomic pathology business for the year was essentially flat year over year and I think a lot of that slowdown had to do with the in-sourcing. The anatomic pathology is just a piece of the broader market for cancer diagnostics and given the molecular test that we offer which are often getting ordered now in conjunction with tissue and other AP work, we feel as though we’re very, very well positioned for the long term, particularly with the 800 pathologists that we’ve got on board to offer consultations.
