Indivumed Opens US-Headquarter in Frederick, MD

Friday, November 2nd 2018. With a symposium about „Personalized Medicine Depends on Tissue Quality“ and an opening ceremony in presence of Benjamin Wu, Maryland Deputy Secretary of Commerce, Jan Gardner, Frederick County Executive and members of the County Council as well as 120 international guests the new Indivumed Headquarter was officially opened.

At the symposium, three leaders in pathology adressed the importance of tissue quality for personalizing cancer therapy and strongly supported Indivumed‘s focus on tissue quality as corner stone for future oncology.

Carolyn Compton, Professor at School of Life Sciences and Biodesign Institute, Arizona State University, pointed out that a major challenge is the lack of reproducibility of scientific data because tissue quality and standardization of tissue collection and processing is still widely neglected.

David Hicks, Professor and Director of Surgical Pathology, University of Rochester Medical Center, NY, showed data demonstrating that even routine diagnostic tests, such as PR and HER-2 testing in breast cancer, provide frequently false negative results when tissue is not rapidly processed after surgical removal. Thereby, even nowadays tissue quality has already a high impact on the diagnostic tests for personalized medicine.

Jim Crawford, Senior Vice President and Executive Director of Laboratory Services, Northwell Health, NY, gave an overview on how tissue quality for personalized medicine can and should be assessed for research but also clinical care purposes.

John Marshall, Professor of Oncology and Director of the Ruesch Center for the Cure of GI-cancers, Georgetown University Hospital in Washington DC, summarized the importance of accurate information about individual tumors for accurate therapy. The complexity of individual cancers and the challenge to identify optimal treatment demand accurate and comprehensive data which go beyond genomics as well as specialists that understand those complex data sets.

Finally, Hartmut Juhl, Professor of Surgery and Founder and CEO of Indivumed, explained IndivuType, a unique global cancer database for research and patient care. It is build on highly standardized and high quality tissue to enables multiomics analysis, and it will be fed from Indivumeds biobank but also from actual patients who will directly benefit from the data and their analysis using bioinformatic and Artificial Intelligence tools.

Approx. 120 guests attended the symposium at Frederick while more than 2,700 used the livestream to follow the exciting presentations online from all over the world.

During the following ribbon-cutting opening ceremony Fernando Andreu, CBO of Indivumed group and CEO of the US subsidiary Indivumed Inc., explained the importance of the 5,500-square-foot space for Indivumeds growth in the US. The Frederick facillity will be used as a central-US biospecimen and data storage facility and will include a research lab to process and analyze samples, in particular for the global cancer database „IndivuType“. Benjamin Wu welcomed Indivumed in Maryland, and pointed out that attracting international companies is of highest priority for the Governor of Maryland. Jan Gardner showed her excitement to attract a biotech company such as Indivumed which joins a great Life Sciences environment in Frederick, including the NCI and 80 additional biotech companies.

With the ribbon cutting by Hartmut Juhl and Fernando Andreu the building became officially active and the work instantly started, initially with 12 local employees