York Teaching Hospital signs up BD FocalPoint

SOURCE BIOSCIENCE PLC - York Teaching Hospital signs up BD FocalPoint

PR Newswire

London, February 25

York Teaching Hospital signs up BD FocalPoint™ and renews £1.3m cervical cancer

Source BioScience (LSE: SBS), the international diagnostics and geneticanalysis business, announces that, following a competitive tender process, YorkTeaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (`York') has renewed its contract forliquid based cytology (`LBC'). York has also committed to implementing SourceBioScience's automated cervical cancer screening BD FocalPoint™ technology. Theagreement is worth a total of £1.3 million over three years and will commenceon 1 April 2013.

Source BioScience provides customers with a unique and complete solution forcervical cancer screening, including HPV testing, from sample collection,processing, imaging and diagnostic testing. The newest development in thescreening process is BD FocalPoint™, the only automated technology for cervicalcancer screening approved for use by the NHS, which is distributed in the UK bySource BioScience alone.

The BD FocalPoint™ technology is able to analyse and identify up to 25% ofscreening samples that can be reported as "No Further Review" (NFR) requiringno primary manual examination. With over 3.9 million tests being undertakenacross England and Wales during 2011-2012, the BD FocalPoint™ technologyrepresents a significant reduction in laboratory workload and the need foradditional staffing and outsourcing.

York Teaching Hospital is the fifth NHS cytology centre in England and Wales toadopt Source BioScience's BD FocalPoint™ and the 7th platform to be placedwithin the NHS. This contract increases the aggregate value of the automatedimaging business to Source BioScience to £0.6 million per annum over the nextthree years.

Trevor Hair, Head Biomedical Scientist for Cytology at York, said: "We'redelighted to have secured this contract on behalf of the Trust. In taking onadditional cervical screening work from Hull and East Riding, our workload willincrease from around 54,000 to 90,000 samples a year. The contract will makeYork laboratory the single cervical cytology screening provider for North andEast Yorkshire and mean that all women who require a cervical screening testwill now be able to have their samples examined at a single laboratory thatwill utilise the latest technology available in the UK."

Dr Nick Ash, CEO at Source BioScience, commented: "Since the NHS published itsimplementation guidelines in July 2011, there has been significant interestfrom NHS Trusts in the BD FocalPoint™ technology. The renewal of the Yorkcontract and the adoption of the technology by another NHS Trust, demonstratesthe determination to provide better timeliness and efficiencies for cervicalcancer screening. This technology is an important growth driver for ourbusiness and we aim to win more contracts during 2013."

During 2012, over two million women had their cervical cancer screening testundertaken using the technology provided by Source BioScience, which representsover 50% of all testing in England and Wales.

Source BioScience plc

About Source BioScience:

Source BioScience plc (LSE: SBS) is an international diagnostics and geneticanalysis business serving the healthcare and research markets. The LifeSciencesdivision provides core laboratory research support from conceptualisation toimplementation, calling upon a wide range of cutting-edge technology platformsincluding an online catalogue of biomolecular tools. The Company is a trustedprovider of a complete range of sophisticated microarray, next generation andconventional sequencing services. GLP, GCP and CPA accreditations make thesequencing offerings also very attractive for applications in regulatorystudies or clinical settings. Its Healthcare operations provide screening andreference laboratory diagnostic testing for cancer and other diseases andadditional predictive testing for treatment optimisation for clinicians andpatients. The Group has its headquarters in Nottingham, UK. Further informationabout Source BioScience can be found at www.sourcebioscience.com

About BD SurePath™ and BD FocalPoint™:

The BD SurePath™ liquid based cytology test is one of the two technologiesapproved for use in the UK in the screening and detection of cervical cancer.The BD SurePath™ test is distributed in the UK by Source BioScience. The BDFocalPoint™ is an automated imaging technology intended to assist in cervicalcancer screening of BD SurePath™ liquid based cytology test slides. It usescomplex algorithms to interpret images of each slide and decide the ten "fieldof view" most likely to have any abnormal cells. It can archive up to 25% as"No Further Review" (`NFR') which then do not need to be screened manually. TheBD FocalPoint™ is the only automated technology for cervical cancer screeningapproved for use by the NHS and is distributed in the UK by Source BioScience.For more information, please visit www.healthcare.sourcebioscience.com/cytology