ABL enters into licensing agreement with CRP-Santé for COMET software

Apr 2 2014

Advanced Biological Laboratories (ABL) S.A., a Luxembourg-based company today announced that it has entered into an exclusive worldwide licensing agreement with CRP-Santé, a Luxembourg-based public research center active in the field of clinically oriented biomedical research, for its COMET (COntext-based Modeling for Expeditious Typing) software, a tool designed to rapidly analyze and optimally subtype large genetic data sets arising from epidemiological or antiretroviral resistance in the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) fields. Integrated in the clinical management and diagnostics platforms of ABL, COMET will contribute to support the decision-making of healthcare professionals in their daily challenge of providing the best treatment adapted to each of their patients with viral and other infectious or chronic diseases.

"COMET is by far the fastest tool available for the classification of viral sequences such as HIV-1/2 and HCV into subtypes or genotypes," said Daniel Struck, bioinformatician at the Laboratory of Retrovirology in CRP-Santé who developed this software. "This advantage is recognized among the scientific community," said Daniel Struck who referred to a publication of Pineda-Peña A.-C. and colleagues in the Journal "Infection, Genetics and Evolution" in 2013 and added that the software is freely available for non-commercial research use only through its dedicated website http://comet.retrovirology.lu.

"I think that the concept of COMET has a great potential for many applications in high-throughput sequence data analysis and that our licensing agreement with ABL will increase the visibility of CRP-Santé's research expertise and capabilities towards healthcare and diagnostics professionals," said Dr. Carole Devaux, Head of the Laboratory of Retrovirology in CRP-Santé.

"We are pleased at ABL to have signed this exclusive commercial licensing agreement with CRP-Santé and to be able to promote COMET alone or embedded within ABL's software applications," stated Dr Chalom Sayada, CEO of ABL. "This tool is already offered in the DeepChek® software for HIV, hepatitis B virus (HBV) and HCV genomic analysis as Virology is our initial main field of applications as of today. We are working already to extend the portfolio of ABL's offering for software managing and analyzing next generation sequencing data for microbiology and Human DNA fields such as Oncology and HLA typing," added Dr. Sayada.