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Swine Flu Has Firms Working Overtime

Local flu test developers and makers of equipment used in identifying flu strains noticed demand for their products peak in the past couple of weeks as the number of confirmed cases of swine flu went past 1,500 worldwide.

Carlsbad-based Life Technologies, which makes instruments used by researchers for identifying infectious diseases, was working to fill orders after the FDA cleared its machines for emergency use in an April 27 letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Peter Dansky, president of the Molecular Biology Systems Division, said Life Technologies had enough of the machines on hand to supply current needs, although it was filling orders very quickly.

?e have a surge of demand for this particular instrument from the labs associated with the public health network,?he said. ?e are redirecting inventory to these labs as a priority.?

The instruments, named Applied Biosystems 7500 and Applied Biosystems 7500 Fast Dx, cost between $50,000 and $60,000 apiece. Dansky said the systems were only developed in the last few years and were originally approved by the FDA for identifying avian flu.

They work by creating millions of copies of a particular sequence in a gene that? of interest in identifying infectious agents. Using a computerized readout, researchers can determine whether someone tests positive for a particular flu strain, including H1N1, or swine flu.

Dansky said he was uncertain whether its machines had detected swine flu in any of the confirmed cases of the illness. But a company spokesman said most samples from state and county health labs that end up at the CDC are run on Life Technologies?system, so the likelihood is high.


Big Business

Either way, Dansky called the instruments ?ig business?for Life Technologies, which reported flat growth in its Molecular Biology Systems Division in the first quarter. Sales for the division stayed at about $367 million year-over-year.

Lately, though, Dansky said he? noticed a ?urge of demand?for the diagnostic instruments from laboratories associated with CDC? public health network.

?e have not developed a clear view of what the impact will be yet,?he said.

At the same time Life Technologies was preparing its machines for rapid delivery, workers at Genzyme? local manufacturing plant were readying flu tests.

Massachusetts-based Genzyme makes one of the 11 FDA-approved tests for rapid detection of influenza A and B viruses. Swine flu, an influenza A-type virus, is thought to show up in rapid antigen tests such as the OSOM tests made by Genzyme, although it? not clear how well.

?he plant did fill a large amount of orders for the OSOM Flu A/B product this week, which is unusual given that we are at the end stages of the normal flu season,?Genzyme spokesman John Lacey said last week.

He added that Genzyme was in preliminary talks with government agencies to identify potential needs.

Another local flu test maker, Quidel, said it, too, was trying to identify future needs for its FDA-approved rapid flu tests.

?ur plan today is to continue to manufacture and build inventories in the event we need larger inventories in the fall,?said CEO Doug Bryant.

Typically at this time, Quidel would have stopped manufacturing kits because seasonal flu would have subsided. Instead, Bryant said it began instituting two 10-hour shifts a day in response to requests and in preparation for future demand.


Shipping Test Kits

Bryant said the company has shipped hundreds of thousands of QuickVue rapid flu test kits to Mexico and a million worldwide. In recent weeks, Quidel shipped 9,000 flu test kits to Mexico City.

It marked a turnaround for the San Diego-based diagnostics business, which just a few months earlier said it would scale back operations in response to the ?oft influenza testing market this season.?

Quidel saw its revenues sink to $16.9 million in the first quarter as flu-related doctor visits dropped off, compared with $40.9 million a year earlier. It reported a larger-than-expected quarterly loss of $2.8 million, or 9 cents a share, compared with net income of $8.6 million, or 26 cents per share, a year earlier.

Sales of its flu tests account for about half its business, with last year? sales at roughly $60 million.

? would expect going forward that the number of physicians using those tests to increase,?Bryant said.

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