Siemens and Bio-Rad expand joint marketing scheme

Siemens has announced an expansion of its global joint marketing agreement with Bio-Rad Laboratories, which will bring a number of innovative products to new client bases.

The extended deal will see Bio-Rad provide quality control (QC) products and Unity data management solutions for the Immulite Immunoassay, Dimension Integrated Chemistry and Dimension Vista Intelligent Lab systems from Siemens.

These Bio-Rad tools were previously only available via Siemens' Advia Chemistry and Advia Centaur Immunoassay systems and offer functionality such as online data submission, real-time QC data management, rules evaluation and analysis.

It follows market research conducted by Siemens that shows the heavy emphasis many laboratories are now placing on QC standards, making it important to offer innovative tools that can help in this regard.

Dave Hickey, chief executive officer for the chemistry, immunoassay, automation and diagnostics IT business at Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics, said this partnership will help users "further streamline inventory management, enhance efficiencies, ensure the reliability of patient results and lead to overall cost savings".

This comes after Siemens partnered with Illumina last month to make its molecular HIV tests compatible with the MiSeq sequencing platform.