The companies believe that the merger will benefit customers in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries enabling them to bring safer products to market faster at a lower cost, while weeding out toxic drug candidates earlier in the development process.
The acquisition will see Reutlingen, Germany-based Experimentelle and Diagnostische Immunologie (EDI) operated as a subsidiary of RBM and continue operations in its current facility.
While terms of the deal have not been disclosed, it is understood that all EDI employees will be retained and EDI will continue to be led by founder Dr Manfred Schmolz.
The acquisition will enable RBM to combine EDI's human organotypic (HOT) cell culture systems with its own multi-analyte profiling (MAP) systems that test for up to 188 biomarkers of various antigens, autoimmune antibodies and infectious diseases.
In addition, RBM will expand its presence into Europe by maintaining the EDI facility with both of the sites benefiting from the increased technology available to them.
"Combining RBM's MAP products and services with EDI's HOT systems enables us to better serve both our existing and new customers," said T. Craig Benson, CEO of RBM.
"These solutions will standardise sample collection, cell treatment and result generation to provide investigators with the most reliable and reproducible approach to therapeutic and consumer product development."
EDI's preclinical cell culture systems consist of multiple primary cell types grown in a 3D architecture to mimic particular human organ systems as closely as possible to generate quality, reproducible data across a range of drug development applications.
As reported earlier this week , 3D cell cultures exhibit protein expression profiles that mimic in vivo cell populations more closely than traditional cell cultures.
In addition, EDI has developed an ex vivo culture system, the Instant Leukocyte Culture System (ILCS) that has been designed to replace the peripheral blood mononuclear cell culture (PBMC) systems used to understand what effect a compound has on the immune system during pre-clinical research programmes.
The ILCS has been designed to minimise the loss of activity that is often observed after cells are isolated and prepared for various assays.
It does this by using a whole blood culture technique that mimics in vivo conditions as closely as possible once a blood sample is removed from a volunteer.
This blood is then incubated in the syringes with the drug candidate within 15 minutes of collection before separation of the serum from sediment by filtration through a valve septum.
The serum is then refrigerated or frozen and sent to the laboratory for analysis.
According to EDI, this approach removes most of the artefacts that are created using traditional leukocyte culture techniques with samples being able to be collected by anyone trained to draw blood outside specialised testing laboratories.
"Working with RBM made great sense, together we will bring the complexities of immune system evaluation to a new level of convenience and simplicity," said Dr Schmolz.
