For Second Time in Three Years, OPKO Health Will Acquire a Clinical Laboratory Company by Spending $1.47 Billion to Acquire Bio-Reference Laboratories

When completed, this acquisition means that the third largest public lab company in the United States will be owned by a multinational biopharmaceutical and diagnostics firm It’s a big medical laboratory acquisition that has some experts on Wall Street shaking their heads. Last Thursday, it was announced that OPKO Health Inc. of Miami, Florida, would pay $1.47 billion to acquire Bio-Reference Laboratories Inc. (NASDAQ: BRLI), the nation’s third largest full-service clinical laboratory. OPKO...

Foundation Medicine Striving to Use Next-Generation Gene Sequencing to Enrich Diagnostic Value Offered to Physicians by Clinical Laboratories

Pathologists will want to understand how this innovative company is doing multi-gene analysis of patient tumors that includes information about therapeutics and clinical trials CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS—Next-generation gene sequencing is already changing how cancer is diagnosed and treated for a growing number of patients. Because it moves healthcare closer toward personalized medicine, this development has major implications for anatomic pathology groups and clinical laboratories. One company...

LabCorp Stops Selling OvaSure Ovarian Cancer Test after FDA Letter

Facing pressure by the Food and Drug Administration over its OvaSure test for ovarian cancer, Laboratory Corporation of America announced last Friday in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it had stopped sales of the test. The dispute between the FDA  and the nation’s second largest laboratory company will be closely watched for insights into how the FDA regulates “home brew” assays. In the October 20, 2008 issue of The Dark Report, an intelligence briefing...
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