August 30, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
MILWAUKEE – Atlanta-based Immucor Inc., a company that develops pre-transfusion blood tests, will spend $1.58 million to expand its facility in Wisconsin and plans to hire 64 new employees, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported this morning.
The privately-held company told the Sentinel that the expansion will allow it to increase production of its products, most of which will be sold overseas. The manufacturing site, located in Brookfield, Wis. will become the primary hub of manufacturing and research and development for Immucor, the Atlanta Business Chronicle noted. The expansion was made possible through $480,000 in tax incentives spread over three years.
Positions the company will hire for are primarily highly skilled slots such as R&D scientists and chemists, the Sentinel said. Immucor currently employs about 1,000 people in the United States as well as several other countries, including Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Immucor said it has sales of $390 million, the Sentinel reported.
Immucor manufactures a number of products related to transplant or transfusion procedures, including its newly launched kidney Solid Organ Response Test (kSORT), a molecular gene expression assay that measures a kidney recipient’s immune response to predict organ rejection and graft injury. The kSORT product was launched in May and is sold through the company’s Immucor DX division, a CLIA certified laboratory. Using a blood draw, kSORT is designed to calculate a patient’s immune risk by “using qPCR to measure RNA gene expression levels.” Then the levels are paired with Immucor’s proprietary algorithm to produce a “personalized risk index” at the time of testing, the company said. Minnie M. Sarwal, a professor of surgery in the Division of Transplant Surgery University of California at San Francisco and the inventor of kSORT, said in a statement at the time of release that “there is a significant unmet need for a non-invasive assay for prospective assessment of the immune risk threshold that drives rejection injury in an organ transplant.”
The new kSORT is expected to complement two of Immucor’s existing products: its C3d product which measures the binding and cleaving of the complement protein C3 and Immucor’s DSA product, which detects donor-specific antibodies in transplant recipient’s blood.
In March, Immucor acquired Mountain View, Calif.-based Sirona Genomics as part of a 2014 agreement between the two companies. With the acquisition, Immucor gained that company’s Human leukocyte antigen typing platform, the MIA FORA NGS. The MIA FORA NGS launched in December 2015 and is available research use only in the US and other countries.
