Article published Peter Kaspar (bioMérieux):
“Our partnership is a question of both strategy and priority”
BIOMérieux, a prominent player on the world in vitro diagnostics scene and a leader in the field of microbiology, has renewed its research partnership with CEA for the period 2010-2014. The partnership concerns more than 100 researchers, evenly divided between the two organisations.
bioMérieux is placing all its bets on one key element to help in the fight against infectious diseases. Its “secret weapon” is swift diagnosis, based on faster, more highly automated and even smarter microbiology to cut the waiting time for results and speed up clinicians' therapeutic decisions. Within this context, the partnership agreement signed with CEA, built on long-standing, shared R&D experience, is clearly seen as a key priority. “We have been working with CEA for a very long time, mainly with LETI in Grenoble,” points out the group's R&D director Peter Kaspar. “One of the reasons why we chose Grenoble as the site for the Centre Christophe Mérieux, our microsystems and molecular biology R&D unit, was its proximity to CEA. We shall now be working with the entire CEA network, which will allow us access to its key skills in the fields of imaging, data processing and analysis, ultrasensitive molecule detection and nanotechnology.” Projects planned for 2010-2014 focus on two main issues. The first is related to new ways of using mass spectrometry in bacteriology - “a scientific field that still faces many problems in terms of cost, work flow and usable information”, as Peter Kaspar puts it, while the second is concerned with imaging applications connected with expert systems for bacteriological identification and work organisation in laboratories. Several other fields of exploration can also be considered with a view to validating new approaches in spectroscopy, developing sensors for detecting volatile compounds and making microbiological results available more rapidly.
bioMérieux, which invests about 12% of its turnover in R&D, prefers to focus on a limited number of projects considered of strategic importance that benefit from significant funding. “In this way, we can avoid spreading our resources too thinly on the ground and focus on genuine technological breakthoughs,” says Peter Kaspar in conclusion.
