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| Vitros 3600 Immunodiagnostic System--Courtesy of Ortho Clinical Diagnostics |
While Ortho Clinical Diagnostics has dragged a little since the Carlyle Group picked it up from Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ), it has tapped a new sales opportunity via a partnership with laboratory automation giant Beckman Coulter.
Ortho Clinical markets the Vitros 3600 Immunodiagnostic System, which has a broad selection of infectious disease tests already in use by several leading reference labs in the U.S. Beckman will place Ortho's machine running HIV and hepatitis assays in laboratories that currently run its Power Processor Sample Handling Systems, and also in some other very high-volume labs, the companies said in a statement.
Beckman has more customers in the U.S. than any other lab automation company. The deal will grant Ortho access to this large customer base, while allowing the laboratories to leverage both Ortho's and Beckman's systems to improve their services.
"This relationship provides both immediate opportunity and long-term value as we continue to enhance efficiency, advance patient care and broaden our customer offerings. Through this relationship, we will be able to apply innovative technologies to deliver enhanced solutions to the highest-volume labs in the U.S.," said John Nosenzo, Beckman Coulter's senior vice president of customer operations and developed markets, in the statement.
The duo will collaborate to get FDA clearance to connect the two systems in order to run infectious disease tests. While the laboratories will be able to run the systems separately, connecting the two will reduce manual handling and human error, an Ortho Clinical spokesperson said.
Ortho Clinical started out at Johnson & Johnson as a diagnostics unit. The Big Pharma offloaded it to the Carlyle Group for $4 billion in June 2014. Since the split, it has commercialized Astute Medical's test for acute kidney injury in U.S. hospitals and inked a $69 million deal to market Quotient's blood transfusion diagnostic. Despite these deals, Ortho still weighed Carlyle down in 2015, reporting to its lenders a 14% drop in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization to $104 million in the quarter ended Sept. 30, which followed an 18% drop in the same period a year earlier. But CEO Martin Madaus isn't worried, telling FierceMedicalDevices in April that becoming a standalone company involves "multi-year efforts," and that he's eyeing Asia as a potential area for growth.