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LabCorp, Duke sign agreement
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Published: March 3, 2009
KANNAPOLIS — LabCorp and Duke University have signed an agreement on storing and maintaining biosamples at the North Carolina Research Campus.
The deal centers around a biorepository LabCorp is building on Cannon Boulevard. The 40,000-square-foot building, slated to open this spring, can house about 10 million samples.
About 1.2 million of those samples will come from Duke's MURDOCK Study, a longitudinal research project that will look at the genetic causes of human disease.
"The future of healthcare is in personalized and genomic medicine which will require an ability to store and analyze large quantities of tissue and blood samples," said Dr. Victor J. Dzau, CEO of Duke University Health System, in a statement.
The agreement details security and handling measures for the samples. The biorepository will be linked with Duke and the David H. Murdock Research Institute at the Core Research Laboratory.
"The biorepository is also an important addition to our long standing relationship with Duke University and a new initiative for LabCorp at NCRC," said LabCorp CEO David King, in a statement.
Dole Food Company owner David Murdock gave Duke a $35 million gift in 2007 to start the study and pledged his support to find other grant funding to keep the study going. The study is centered at the research campus and will utilize the advanced scientific equipment in the Core Research Laboratory to help identify genetic differences of the diseases.
MURDOCK Study Project Leader Ashley Dunham said Duke wants to recruit 50,000 participants from Kannapolis and Cabarrus County within four years.
Dunham said researchers want a good representation of the Cabarrus County population.
"We want healthy people, sick people, young and old," she said.
The goal: By creating a registry of participants who give a blood sample, and by using the advanced scientific equipment at the Core Research Laboratory, researchers hope to study disease on the molecular level.
The research can lead to "personalized medicine," where treatment of a particular disease is tailor-made to fit a patient's metabolism.
LabCorp, which is based in Burlington, is one of the first corporate partners of the research campus. It provides medical diagnostics and genetic testing. Andrew Conrad, David Murdock's science advisor, is the chief scientific officer of National Genetics Institute, a subsidiary of LabCorp.
To enroll, participants have to be 18 years old and a resident of Kannapolis or Cabarrus County.
For more information, contact the MURDOCK Study office in Kannapolis at 1-877-MRDCK08 (1-877-673-2508)
• Contact reporter Ben McNeely: 704-789-9131
• Comment on this story online at www.independenttribune.com
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