Arbor Vita Corporation (AVC), a privately held biopharmaceutical company, today announced a strategic collaboration in women’s health with BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company), a leading global medical technology company. The collaboration and license agreement is initially focused on the development of a commercial diagnostic for cervical cancer, which globally affects more than 500,000 women each year. The discovery that human papillomavirus (HPV) causes cervical cancer has led to a new generation of diagnostics directed at detecting HPV infection. HPV infection is quite common and only rarely progresses to cancer or pre-cancer. The joint effort by AVC and BD is directed at developing a more specific diagnostic for cervical cancer screening. The new cervical cancer diagnostic is one of the first applications of AVC’s PDZ platform. PDZ protein domains organize critical cellular processes including cell signaling and cell-cell contacts. PDZs, targeted by many pathogens, play a key role in HPV’s ability to cause cancer. The new diagnostic exploits this PDZ interaction specifically to detect HPV infection that has progressed to pre-cancer and cancer. “BD has been a pioneer and long-standing leader in protein-based diagnostics,” said Peter S. Lu, M.D., AVC Chief Executive Officer. “We look forward to building on this collaboration toward the successful introduction of a novel PDZ-based cervical cancer diagnostic screening test.”