Company’s Capabilities in PacBio’s SMRT Sequencing a Key Factor in Winning Contract to Process Thousands of Samples Per Week

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. (Nasdaq:PACB) today announced that HistoGenetics, a pioneer and global leader in high-resolution HLA sequence-based typing services, has received a multi-year contract to perform HLA typing using PacBio® sequencing. The contract is expected to drive demand for several thousand samples per week over the next several years.

HLA typing, the analysis of genes in the human leukocyte antigen region of the human genome, is of critical importance for research in tissue transplantation matching, autoimmune disease-association studies, drug hypersensitivity research, and other applications. These genes are highly polymorphic and contain thousands of alleles that code for proteins important in recognizing foreign antigens. This complexity has made analyzing them with other sequencing technologies both challenging and cos