AgilityBio and Advinus announce partnership to introduce digital pathology services in pre clinical research

Society of Toxicologic Pathology India, Annual meeting, Bangalore, October 2008

Cupertino, Thursday, October 23, 2008

AgilityBio, a division of BioImagene Inc, and Advinus Therapeutics, a TATA enterprise, today announced a partnership that will enable providing imaging services in conjunction with preclinical development services offered by Advinus.  This partnership will bring about a synergy between drug development at US based biotech and pharma industries and India's highly developed life sciences service industry. Advinus, which is a leading service provider of pre-clinical development services to global Pharma and Biotech industry will combine its services with AgilityBio’s imaging services that use BioImagene’s cutting edge digital pathology solutions for cancer diagnosis and research.

Efficient management and analysis of image data is a critical component for successful decision making in toxicology. In the drug discovery and development fields, extracting meaningful information and knowledge from image data is still manual and hence inefficient and expensive.  This partnership will offer customers a high value solution for performing toxicology studies and rapid image management and processing, providing novel opportunities for global collaboration.

Speaking on the occasion, Dr. Nimish Vachharajani, VP and Head Pharmaceutical Development at Advinus said, “This alliance brings together the world-class preclinical development services of Advinus and the cutting-edge technology of AgilityBio together for our customers. In particular for our international clients, digitalization of slides from toxicology studies will offer an affordable alternative to reduce travel time and costs for peer-reviews.” "We are very pleased to welcome Advinus as our partner.  We foresee an acceleration of drug development and numerous opportunities for Indian pathologists to integrate with the global drug discovery markets.  We foresee a significantly improved work flow in the laboratory and seamless execution of preclinical projects, which will ultimately save veterinary pathologists a lot of time.” said Dr. Ajit Singh, CEO of BioImagene.

Dr. Roli Khattri, CSO of AgilityBio said “Advinus is a leader in providing outsourcing solutions to the global pharmaceutical and biotech industry with state of the art facilities in Bangalore, India.  Integrating our pathology slide scanning, web-based hosting and archiving services with Advinus’s preclinical studies will reduce the time and risk involved in shipping slides for international customers and an easy access to expert veterinary pathologist opinions from around the world for Advinus scientists.

About Advinus
Advinus Therapeutics, a TATA enterprise, is a research based pharmaceutical company founded by eminent global Pharmaceutical executives. The company is first of its kind in India to offer end-to end-development services to the global pharmaceutical, agrochemical and biotechnology industries, while creating long term value through internal and collaborative drug discovery. The primary focus of the company’s discovery efforts are in metabolic diseases and inflammatory diseases. Advinus is also pursuing discovery of new drug treatments for neglected or developing world diseases. Advinus’ drug development operations support and supplement the client resources at increased levels of cost-efficiency by providing services in all areas of preclinical and early clinical and pharmaceutical development. Advinus is the only organization in India with two international GLP accreditations from the German and Dutch authorities, with an AAALAC accredited animal facility. For company information, visit www.advinus.com, Media Contact: Thomas Putti, Thomas.putti@advinus.com, +91-80-2839-4959

About AgilityBio
AgilityBio, an affiliate of BioImagene provides the next generation of integrated outsourcing solutions for pharmaceutical and biotech companies.  AgilityBio facilitates outsourcing of preclinical studies, therapeutic and diagnostic clinical trials and biomarker studies. 
Media contact: Poornima Kumar pkumar@agilitybio.com , 408 207 4237.

About BioImagene
BioImagene is a leading provider of total digital pathology solutions for applications including clinical diagnostics and drug discovery. BioImagene products are FDA cleared for specific clinical applications, and are intended for research use for other applications. Media Contact: Suchitra Parthasarathy at 408 207 4285.