CAMBRIDGE, Mass. and ROSTOCK, Germany and BERLIN,, May 05, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CENTOGENE (Nasdaq: CNTG), a commercial-stage company focused on rare diseases that transforms real-world clinical and genetic data into actionable information for patients, physicians, and pharmaceutical companies, today announced it will expand its testing efforts for the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19. The Company was previously testing in Germany’s Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania region, and will now be offering its extensively validated SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR testing to the rest of the world. This announcement comes as one of the Company’s latest initiatives to support the earliest possible diagnosis of COVID-19 and prevent a further outbreak.
CENTOGENE Senior Vice President of Clinical Lab Operations and Head of the Hamburg Laboratory Dr. Florian Vogel stated, “With the recent addition of our new lab and streamlined COVID-19 testing workflows via high-throughput, high-quality analyses, we have been able to significantly increase our testing capacities ─ enabling us to provide time-sensitive diagnostic solutions to patients and physicians around the world.”
Prof. Arndt Rolfs, CEO of CENTOGENE, said, “To overcome this global crisis, we must significantly increase testing efforts around the world to support early diagnosis and minimize the outbreak of COVID-19. Leveraging our existing infrastructure and capabilities, we have developed a fully validated sample collection kit to detect SARS-CoV-2 RNA. Additionally, we have opened an entirely new lab in Hamburg. The entire workflow, starting with sampling and ending with sending results to tested individuals, requires a strong combination of lab technology and IT support, e.g., secured patient data using blockchain technology. With tests being performed in ISO 15189 accredited medical diagnostic laboratories, and patient data privacy ensured by using state-of-the-art security mechanisms, CENTOGENE offers complete assurance and peace of mind as a partner of choice. We are convinced that with these latest achievements in our series of efforts in the fight against COVID-19, we will be able to support a return to new normalcy.”
About CENTOGENE
CENTOGENE engages in diagnosis and research around rare diseases transforming real-world clinical and genetic data into actionable information for patients, physicians, and pharmaceutical companies. Our goal is to bring rationality to treatment decisions and to accelerate the development of new orphan drugs by using our extensive rare disease knowledge, including epidemiological and clinical data, as well as innovative biomarkers. CENTOGENE has developed a global proprietary rare disease platform based on our real-world data repository with approximately 2.5 billion weighted data points from approximately 500,000 patients representing over 120 different countries as of December 31, 2019.
The Company’s platform includes epidemiologic, phenotypic, and genetic data that reflects a global population, and also a biobank of these patients’ blood samples. CENTOGENE believes this represents the only platform that comprehensively analyzes multi-level data to improve the understanding of rare hereditary diseases, which can aid in the identification of patients and improve our pharmaceutical partners’ ability to bring orphan drugs to the market. As of December 31, 2019, the Company collaborated with over 39 pharmaceutical partners covering over 45 different rare diseases.