Duke University Medical Center of Durham, N.C., and Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings (LabCorp) have formed a joint venture to commercialize new biomarkers.

The new entity is designed to speed the translation of newly discovered biomarkers into widely available clinical tools that can measure individual therapeutic responses, predict disease progression and evaluate a number of biologic or disease-causing processes, said Burlington, N.C.- based LabCorp.

The biomarker factory will benefit from hundreds of thousands of biological samples contributed by Duke, as well as the infrastructure already in place in the Duke-led, large-scale epidemiology study and will also capitalize on LabCorp’s biorepository being developed to discover and validate biomarkers in human disease.