TGen, ABL sign licensing agreement for tuberculosis test distribution

A new tuberculosis (TB) test developed by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) will be marketed and distributed by Advanced Biological Laboratories (ABL) under the terms of a licensing agreement reached between the two companies this week.

The test — DeepCheck-TB — is currently only usable in research, though ABL want to oversee a compact, portable and economical diagnostic model for global physician use. Its creators believe it has the potential for major action against a disease that infects nearly one-fourth of the world’s population.

“Significantly, our TB assay technology holds the potential to provide doctors — even those in relatively rural settings — a quick and economical way to accurately determine the exact drugs that can and can’t be used for each patient,” David Engelthaler, co-director of TGen’s Pathogen and Microbiome Division, said.

Its creators have said that tests utilizing DeekCheck-TB can be completed within 2-3 days and can identify drug-resistance strands of TB. Current tests come with no such guarantee and can take as long as nine weeks to complete. Given that drug-resistant strains have been mutating into use around the world, that fact becomes an ever-greater concern for health experts.

ABL, a Luxembourg-based company, wants to see the new test distributed worldwide.