DES PLAINES, Illinois (Reuters) - They call it the "Ibis War Room."
For the past seven months, executives at Abbott Molecular have regularly huddled in the sparse conference room at the Abbott Laboratories Inc (ABT.N) business unit's headquarters to plot how to best use newly acquired technology they believe can revolutionize the field of diagnostics.
Management's top priority is figuring out how to leverage its $215 million purchase of Ibis Biosciences.
At $270 million in sales last year, Abbott Molecular now represents a drop in the bucket compared with the overall revenue for parent company Abbott Labs, one of the world's largest healthcare companies.
But the unit grew 25 percent last year, and with Ibis in the fold, Abbott Molecular President Stafford O'Kelly said the options for developing new tests are limitless.
The Ibis technology already has been used to detect swine flu, or H1N1, food contamination and has applications in forensics.
In an interview, O'Kelly said the company is working diligently to pull together data to get quick U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance for the H1N1 test to be used in a clinical setting by the autumn flu season. It is currently being used by the government and by researchers.
"There is no technology that we know of that has the ability to do what this (Ibis test) does," O'Kelly said. "It reads the same (Ribonucleic acid, or RNA, and Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA) code, but the traditional approach takes one to two weeks and is more expensive. We can get a result within a day."
The Ibis technology sequences DNA or RNA using polymerase chain reaction, known as PCR, which enables researchers to produce millions of copies of a specific DNA or RNA sequence in a short period of time.
Ibis technology then combines PCR with mass spectrometry, an analytical technique used to determine the composition of a molecule. The weight of the DNA or RNA is compared with Ibis's vast database of organisms, and is then matched to identify an organism. Each microorganism has a unique signature based on the weight of the DNA or RNA.
The other advantage Abbott's flu test has over traditional methods is that it looks for more than just swine flu. It is particularly valuable for surveillance purposes because it can detect sudden and gradual changes in the virus.
The test currently is used for surveillance by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Navy Health Research Center.
The Ibis technology is primarily used by researchers to identify bacteria, viruses and fungi and can provide important information about drug resistance, virulence and strain type of these pathogens.
O'Kelly said that when Abbott Molecular bought Ibis in January, prior to the swine flu pandemic scare, management had intended to focus on sepsis, a serious condition in which the body is fighting a severe infection that has spread through the bloodstream.
The technology also has applications in forensics, and can perform faster and cheaper DNA testing. A British forensics lab used the Ibis technology to identify World War I soldiers using degraded DNA from human remains, O'Kelly said.
"There are opportunities for us in food testing and in the biopharma space, food safety, respiratory infection, TB resistance ... There are a lot of possibilities," he added.
Abbott Molecular is collaborating with FDA to expand the agency's food testing capabilities using the technology, he said. The company also worked with a biotech company, which he declined to name, to help it determine that a virus that had contaminated the fermenters it used to grow drugs was at the root of a quality problem.
O'Kelly said that in order to pursue such opportunities, Abbott Molecular would likely partner with another company that has expertise in a specific space.
Abbott Molecular makes genomic tests for chromosome changes associated with congenital disorders and cancer. It makes instruments and reagents, or chemical agents for use in chemical reactions, used to conduct sophisticated analysis of patient DNA and RNA.
Earlier this week, Abbott Molecular, the third-largest maker of such tests after Roche Holdings AG (ROG.VX) and Gen-Probe Inc (GPRO.O), said it said it had entered into an agreement with British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline PLC (GSK.L) to develop a test to screen for lung cancer using another technology it calls FISH.
The test will focus on an antigen called MAGE-A3 and will screen for non-small lung cancer tumors.
O'Kelly said the company will be announcing a similar collaboration with another pharmaceutical company within 30 days.
The diagnostic molecular test Abbott Molecular is developing with Glaxo will be based on its PCR technology. It is intended to screen non-small cell lung cancer tumors for expression of the MAGE-A3 antigen.
"We've been talking about personalized medicine for 15, 20 years. This is just the beginning," O'Kelly said.
(Reporting by Debra Sherman, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)
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