“All substances are poisonous, only the right dose distinguishes medicine from venom”

BioStrands is a Biotechnology Research and Development Company. Active in the fields of Biotechnology and Chemistry. It was founded in 1996 in Trieste and estabilished in the Scientific and Technological Park named Area Science Park were it was located until March 2005 when production was started. At that time, it became necessary to move to the Businnes Innovation Center-Sviluppo Italia. The new location allowed the change from pure R&D company to an R&D and production firm.
Biostrand's activities are focused on molecular virology, and especially addressed to pharmaceutical and diagnostics industries, but also to research centres, universities and specialty clinics.
BioStrands aims to to stand aside the pharmaceutical industry, with the ambitious objective of matching the pharmacological proposal with diagnostics allowing easy quantification of the drugs used (TDM) allowing the clinicians maximum efficiency in patients’ managment.
The development of highly personal pharmacological treatments allows to substantially reduce side effects which can be dangerous for the patient and also reduce economic inefficiencies which might be conncted with the treatment.
Thus we contribute to improve the quality of life of chronic patients optimizing the cost of health managment.
In this view, for the therapeutic monitoring of AIDS patients, BioStrands has produced a line of ELISA kits (TDM ELISA) usefull for the quantitative detection of plasmatic concentrations of the major antiretroviral drugs inhibiting HIV- 1 protease.
Such tests allow to evaluate if the dose of drug take by a patient is enough to guarantee the inhibition of viral growth or if it is too high, reducing unpleasant side effects and allowing personalized treatments and easier compliance.
The kits of the TDM Elisa line proved to be reliable for the quantitative determination of drugs in a short time at a reasonable cost. They are tests easy to perform because of the simple handling of samples without the need of dedicated instrumentation and highly trained personnell.

BioStrands has also developed an innovative phenotyping method which allows to monitor the development of resistances to HIV protease inhibiting drugs during HAART ( Highly Active Anti Retroviral Therapy ). This method can, by all means, be considered an “anti-virogram” and allows to handle a pharmacological protocol aimed at efficiently managing therapeutic failures linked to the apparence of viral strains resistant to one specific drug..
Such a method has no infection risk for the tecnician because the samples used are not infectious.
In the future, the use of anti-viral drugs in therapeutic strategies against HCV, HBV, Herpes and othe viruses will require a parallel resistance monitoring system and in this view this method has been patented by BioStrands as an open system which allows to transfer the experience acquired to other active principles and application fields.
BioStrands stands by the side of all clinicians who want to optimize therapeutic protocols for chronic diffused or particular pathologies, with diagnostic methods easy to perform in any clinical lab.

BioStrands is certified "Laboratorio d'Eccellenza": according to Law 46/80 art. 4, any reaserch project committed to us allow the committant industry a 50% reduction of costs