With a 50-year history as a service provider to the life sciences industry, ABL brings a broad technical knowledge base, highly experienced work force, and seasoned project management to every program.  Our goal is to become a seamless extension of our clients’ product development group – helping them advance today’s ideas into tomorrow’s medicines.  Our history, capabilities and expertise allow ABL to provide solution based services to our clients.

Contract Research – Accelerating Candidate Selection
ABL scientists have over 500 peer reviewed publications pertaining to a wide array of product types (vaccines, protein therapeutics, peptides, microbicides and small molecules), demonstrating our strong interests in scientific innovation and in providing services to meet diverse client needs. We are industry experts in nonhuman primate model design and in data analysis for preclinical trials.

Contract Manufacturing – Advancing Products into the Clinic
ABL has produced cGMP material since 1985.  In 2011, we expanded our capacity and capabilities: moving into a new cGMP facility designed for multi-product operations. This facility utilizes a modular framework and disposable technologies to reduce timelines and lower costs.  Our production, quality and project management groups are fully integrated to advance our clients’ programs into the clinic.  We specialize in producing Phase I/II material and providing the necessary support for successful IND filing.

ABL History
1961 – Bionetics Research Laboratories (BRL) is established  to conduct biomedical contract research, working mainly on U.S. government projects.
1968 – BRL acquired by Litton Industries and became Litton Bionectics, Inc. (LBI).  LBI continued to expand in various areas of biomedical research, especially in cancer and retroviral diseases. 
1985 – LBI’s biomedical R&D and diagnostic product assets acquired by Organon Teknika n.v., a subsidiary of Akzo Nobel, Inc. The government research contract operations was later renamed Advanced Bioscience Laboratories, Inc. (ABL).
2001 – ABL acquired by bioMerieux, Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Institut Merieux, with its North American corporate headquarters in Durham, NC.
2004 – ABL spun out from bioMerieux, operating as an independent U.S. corporation, incorporated in Delaware.
2011 – ABL moves to its current location in Rockville, MD.  The new 72,000sqft facility allows for the expansion of our preclinical laboratories and contains purpose-built multiproduct cGMP suites that can handle mammalian, microbial, and viral based platforms.

ABL Milestones
Throughout its history, and working with government and commercial partners, ABL investigators have played key roles advancing immunological and virological research.  Some milestones of note include:

1972 – Isolation of reverse transcriptase from human acute leukemia leukocytes
1976 – Discovery and characterization of Interleukin-2 (IL-2)
1981-82 – Isolation and characterization of the first human retroviruses, HTLV-I and HTLV-II
1984 – Co-discovery of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-I) and its characterization as the etiology of AIDS
1984 – Development of the first diagnostic HIV-1 blood test
1990-present – Development and optimization of immunological tools for evaluations of immune responses in humans, primates, rabbits and rodents
1995-97 – Identification and characterization of beta-chemokines as HIV-1 soluble suppressors
2000-present – Development of molecular assays for RNA and DNA detection and quantitation of multiple biomarkers (e.g. dengue, cancer-specific antigens)

ABL has produced cGMP material for commercial and government clients since 1985. Examples of our cGMP and development experience include: