Meridian Bioscience said on Thursday that it has made a minority investment of an undisclosed amount in Oasis Diagnostics with the right to acquire Oasis in the future.
 

Oasis, based in Vancouver, Washington, develops, manufactures, and sells pre-analytic tools for collecting, preserving, and transporting saliva and other oral fluids. These include DNA•SAL for DNA collection; RNAPro•SAL and Pure•SAL for RNA collection; Pedia•SAL for the passive collection of saliva from neonates and premature babies; Micro•SAL for collection from small animals; and Versi•SAL for use in laboratories as universal collection devices.
 

The company also sells various diagnostic tests based on its non-invasive saliva collection technologies, such as VerOFy, a point-of-care platform that provides multiple disease diagnostics or quantitative biomarker detection in 20 minutes or less from saliva samples.
 

"The transport of human specimens safely and securely has been an important component of Meridian's product offerings since our founding," Meridian CEO John Kraeutler said in a statement. "Through our diagnostics and life science customer interactions we have recognized the growing importance of oral fluids as a preferred sample for many assays, especially for the measurement of DNA and RNA."
 

As such, Meridian's investment "represents an important step in expanding our capabilities in pre-analytic specimen collection and transport as well as opening potential new diagnostic markets for our simple, rapid diagnostic technologies," Kraeutler added.