Mérieux Alliance - About to join MetaHIT

Mérieux Alliance is a global biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the research, development and commercialization of innovative pharmaceutical and biotechnology products. Indeed, Mérieux Alliance is a holding of companies focused on in vitro diagnostics, immunotherapy and food safety. bioMérieux is the worldwide leader on in vitro diagnostics in microbiology; moreover, bioMérieux industry (around 15% of bioMérieux overall sale income) and Silliker are major actors in the field of food safety: bioMérieux industry develops and manufactures detection systems and reagents while Silliker provides quality control and consulting.

Mérieux Alliance, through bioMérieux and Silliker, offers a unique capacity to both develop novel tests for bacterial pathogen detection and provide an international distribution network. We hope that the bacterial sequence information which will be generated by the MetaHit project can be translated to novel diagnostic tests and we certainly wish to contribute to this major goal. Indeed, such tests might be useful for detecting bacterial pathogens in human blood and tissues as well as in contaminated food and water. They might also contribute to a novel approach to personalized medicine.

Moreover, Mérieux-Alliance, throughTransgene (Strasbourg, France) and Advanced Bioscience Laboratory (Bethesda, USA) will also evaluate how the intestinal microbiote may interfere with the immune response to vaccines and whether this might lead to define novel adjuvants.