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 “It’s our mission to be the leaders – the innovators in diagnostic medicine. We want to be the ones who bring new techniques that allow a diagnosis under a variety of conditions.” - Steve Kleiboeker, DVM, PhD, Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer
ViraCor’s Research, Development & Refinement (RD&R) department takes the science of our clinical diagnostic testing to a level surpassing that of traditional reference laboratories. Our RD&R department is ViraCor’s center of innovation, discovery, and collaboration. Our commitment to provide the most advanced diagnostics to the immunocompromised patient population is accomplished by our continuing investment in RD&R.
Research & Development
The first commercially available quantitative real-time PCR tests for adenovirus, BK virus and JC virus emerged from ViraCor’s R&D department — a trend we intend to continue. Currently, we are in the advanced stages of launching several new assays for viral pathogens posing significant risks to immunocompromised patients. We are also working to improve the current state of fungal diagnostics with quantitative real-time PCR assays for Candida and Aspergillus species, which will be a significant improvement over culture and ELISA techniques. Preliminary research includes new diagnostic approaches to manage immunocompromised patient care, such as utilizing the latest technologies to implement multi-pathogen screening and integrating novel assays to assess immune response with pathogen diagnostics. Our immunological research has already been realized with the launch of the BK virus antibody assay, which allows physicians to determine if organ donors and recipients have been previously infected with this clinically significant pathogen. In addition to our research into novel diagnostic assays, we perform specialty validations for clients by designing studies to validate assay performance under highly specified conditions.
Refinement
At ViraCor, we believe that improving and ensuring the accuracy of our current diagnostic offerings are just as important as developing new ones, so we made refinement a key component of R&D, thus creating what is now referred to as our RD&R department. An important aspect to the refinement function of RD&R is ensuring our assays continue to detect the target pathogens despite the natural genomic changes that occur over time. We actively monitor and refine assay targets to account for new mutations and, therefore, greatly reduce and ideally eliminate false negative results due to genetic variation of the pathogens. When refinement is necessary to ensure accurate analysis, we go to great lengths to maintain consistency in reporting results.
Collaboration
Our many collaborative partnerships with academic institutions and transplant centers have led to impactful studies, serving to progress scientific knowledge of infectious diseases in transplant patients and continual improvement in available diagnostics. For example, we have recently concluded a post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorder (PTLD) study utilizing our EBV assay with Dr. Donald Tsai at the University of Pennsylvania. Browse our abstracts and publications .
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