International News In Brief

Mad Cow disease: Filtration technology in development by Pall Corp. reduces infectious vCJD (variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human variant of bovine spongiform encephalopathy) prions in blood below the detection limit of current methods, company announces March 18. Pall will submit a regulatory application in Europe by year-end for its vCJD infectivity assay. Separately, the European Commission endorses InPro's automated conformation-dependent immunoassay (aCDI) and the Prionics-Check luminescence immunoassay (LIA) for BSE March 14. Manufactured by Pierce Biotechnology, the LIA is slated for EU launch in the second quarter...