The new facility, which has been established in association with Shanghai Clinical Research Center (SCRC), builds on the company’s previous collaboration in Beijing, China from 2008. PPD will now compete with other CROs with established central labs in China, including Icon, LabCorp and Medpace.
PPD may also be attempting to contend with the central labs leaders worldwide – LabCorp’s Covance and Quintiles, which recently formed a JV with Quest Diagnostics in the labs space.
The offerings of the new PPD site include safety and general lab testing, specialized testing, biomarker testing, and custom assay development and testing services. PPD also has clinical development expertise supported by 20 facilities throughout the Asia Pacific region.
The company noted that this latest central lab provides the same services as PPD’s other facilities in Brussels, Belgium; Highland Heights, Kentucky; and Singapore. The Belgian and Singaporean facilities saw an expansion of services back in 2013 to add microbiology testing to meet client demand.
All of PPD’s central labs use identical testing platforms, calibrators and reagents for all laboratory assays, as well as the same lot numbers of standards for calibration to ensure identical results regardless of where testing is performed.
“Our global network of central labs is committed to bringing value across the product development continuum,” said Andrew Cunningham, VP of global laboratory services at PPD.
The new facility is accredited via SCRC’s medical license issued by China’s Ministry of Health, as well as the College of American Pathologists, NGSP and ISO 15189 certifications—all of which are crucial to conducting clinical trials in China successfully.
In addition to central labs, PPD Laboratories also includes: good manufacturing practices (GMP) labs in Athlone, Ireland, and Middleton, Wisconsin; bioanalytical labs in Middleton and Richmond, Virginia; and vaccine sciences labs in Richmond and Wayne, Pennsylvania.