Philips and Janssen pharmaceuticals partner to fight brain disease

Technology company Philips and Belgian pharmaceutical company Janssen Pharmaceutica have joined forces to come up with a more efficient way to test blood levels of patients with brain disease, Omroep Brabant reports.

Philips already has years of research and development on a portable device for doing blood tests. The development of the unit initially focused on enabling emergency hospitals to quickly and easily determine whether a patient has had a heart attack by checking for a certain protein that appears in the case of a heart attack. This technique can also be used to identify other molecules that indicate other conditions.

Janssen Pharmaceutica manufactures medicines against a range of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Blood tests are needed to determine whether a medicine is having effect. With Philip's handheld device, this no longer has to be done in a hospital laboratory.

The device, called the Philips Minicare System, is intended for general practitioners, doctors in hospital and for home use. The device is currently still in development by a new subsidiary of Philips called Philips Handheld Diagnostics, which is located at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven.