31 January 2018 - - Santa Clara, California application focused solutions provider Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) has formed a strategic scientific collaboration with the Los Angeles, California-based University of Southern California Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience to create an Agilent Center of Excellence (CoE) in Biomolecular Characterization, the company said.
The center will be housed in Michelson Hall, a state-of-the-art research facility. The aim of the center is to establish a convergence of researchers across science and engineering to work together on multidisciplinary approaches for the development of improved health care through new drugs, diagnostics, and medical devices.
The Agilent CoE will provide a collaborative scientific environment with access to new Agilent instrumentation and technologies for undergraduate and graduate students, local customers, and offer broad exposure to researchers who are leaders in their respective fields.
Key to the Agilent CoE will be a collaboration with principal investigator Dr. Valery Fokin, whose research focuses on chemical reactivity and biological interactions at the molecular level.
The Fokin lab will contribute to multiple collaborative drug discovery projects ranging from chemical synthesis of screening and focused libraries and biological assay implementation to the development of targeted drug delivery systems, diagnostics, and vaccines.
Agilent partners with pharmaceutical companies to develop immunohistochemical-based diagnostics for cancer therapy. The company provides instruments, software, services, and solutions to the life sciences, diagnostics and applied chemical markets. It generated revenues of USD4.20 bn in fiscal 2016 and employs about 13,000 people worldwide.
The USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience brings together a diverse network of premier scientists and engineers from the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, and Keck School of Medicine of USC to solve intractable problems from cancer, to neurological disease, to cardiovascular disease.