Thermo Fisher Scientific has announced a partnership with Mindray to make available to customers two clinical chemistry analysers in the US and Canada for drug screening in clinical and drug court laboratories.

Stefan Wolf, President, Clinical Diagnostics Business, Thermo Fisher Scientific said, "Through this exclusive partnership with Mindray we are able to address the needs of our customers in commercial labs, hospitals and the criminal justice field. Now we can better cater to the needs of those laboratories seeking to expand or increase their testing volumes, and laboratories working to consolidate and centralise their testing sites with these two medium- to high-throughput instruments."

To provide access to drug testing, Thermo Fisher and Mindray have entered into an agreement to offer the FDA-cleared and Health Canada–approved BS-480 (400 tests/hour) and BA-800M (800 tests/hour) analysers to toxicology labs. Thermo Fisher will also provide an extensive menu of wet lab–validated Thermo Scientific DRI and CEDIA drugs of abuse immunoassay reagents with the instruments to enable the screening of urine samples for the presence of a given drug or a class of drugs.

Taken together, the world-class DRI and CEDIA drugs of abuse immunoassay reagents, validated on Mindray's instruments, bring a combination of performance and reliability from a single source in a cost-effective, plug-and-play solution. The solution streamlines the drug screening workflow and automates it to reduce risk of human error. The instruments also come with onboard software that has many advanced features, including sample/reagent probe collision protection, sample aggregate detection and a five-minute daily push-button self-service maintenance programme.

Thermo Fisher began distributing, installing, training and servicing Mindray BS-480 and BA-800M instruments in the US and Canada last month.