Covance Buys Expands Biomarker Services with Caprion Pact

Covance has purchased a minority equity stake in Caprion Proteomics, a  provider of proteomics-based services. Covance has also hired a new vice president to lead its Biomarker team and that it plans to establish a Biomarker Center of Excellence at its Greenfield, IN campus.

These moves are intended to enable Covance to capitalize on the emerging high-growth service market in biomarker discovery, verification, validation, and deployment across the drug development continuum, from preclinical to post-marketing surveillance.

Covance will serve as the exclusive CRO distributor of Caprion’s proteomic biomarker services. In addition, Caprion will serve as Covance’s exclusive proteomic discovery provider. Through this alliance, Covance and Caprion will offer pharmaceutical and biotechnology drug development customers a “distinctive, innovative, and integrated biomarker solution,” according to a Covance statement.

“We are very pleased to be adding Caprion’s solid scientific capabilities and leading biomarker technology platform to Covance’s line up,” said Deborah Tanner, corporate senior vice president and president of Covance Central Laboratory Services. “We expect that our clients will have a keen interest in this additional capability given Caprion’s impressive track record of accelerating biomarker validation for early drug safety and efficacy assessment.”

“We are excited to join forces with Covance’s market-leading central laboratory and world-class scientific talent,” said Martin LeBlanc, president and chief executive officer of Caprion. “Over the past five years, Caprion has established a large pharmaceutical customer base through employing our distinctive, best-in-class technology platform, which we expect will be further adopted in the market as a result of our alliance with Covance. Most importantly, we believe this alliance, which combines Covance’s leading research services platform with Caprion’s leading biomarker platform, will yield superior biomarker solutions for our clients.”

Covance’s Biomarker Center of Excellence will focus specifically on biomarker testing and validation and leverage the discovery support services of Caprion and of the services that already reside at Greenfield, including in vivo preclinical safety and efficacy assessment, and a variety of sophisticated preclinical imaging modalities.

The biomarker business will be led by Thomas Turi, Ph.D., Covance’s new vice president of Biomarkers. In his new role, Dr. Turi will be responsible for building the Center of Excellence for Biomarkers leading the Biomarker Expert Team.

Dr. Turi joins Covance with more than 14 years of experience leading drug discovery projects ranging from exploratory through early development programs. Prior to Covance, Dr. Turi spent his career at Pfizer, where he held a broad array of scientific leadership positions of increasing responsibility. Most recently, Dr. Turi served as the senior director of Translational Biomarkers and Mechanistic Biology at Pfizer’s laboratories in Groton, CT.