Company Announcements

In May, RainDance Technologies named Andy Watch vice president and chief marketing officer. Most recently, he was vice president of SOLiD Sequencing Product Management at Life Technologies.

RainDance Technologies announced in June a multiyear collaboration with Sony DADC Austria for the codevelopment and manufacture of microdroplet-based “smart consumables.” The first product released is the single-use HeatWave chip for RainDance’s RDT 1000 instrument.

Geospiza and NuGEN announced a comarketing agreement to develop an NGS workflow for large disease research studies based on cloud software.

Dionex partnered with Genevac to offer its Rocket Evaporator.

Roche and NuGEN announced in April the copromotion of Roche’s GS FLX and GS Junior sequencers and NuGEN’s Ovation RNA-Seq System to enable whole-transcriptome profiling with low-abundance RNA samples.

IntegenX will automate NuGEN’s sample preparation workflows on its Apollo series NGS library-preparation instruments, starting with the Ovation RNA-Seq System.

In May, Pressure BioSciences entered into a distribution agreement with KeraFAST for several of its products.

In June, Pressure BioSciences named Jeffrey N. Peterson, CEO of Target Discovery, to its Board. The company also announced $1.1 million in aggregate gross proceeds from the first two tranches of its Series C offering.

NorDiag signed an OEM agreement with MP Biomedicals for its Arrow RNA and DNA extraction system.

In May, Precision System Science amended its OEM agreement with Life Technologies, expanding the scope to include NGS sample preparation instruments.

Product Introductions

Pressure BioSciences launched the portable SHREDDER SG3 system for breaking apart difficult-to-disrupt tissues, as well as tough organisms. The system can be used with the company’s mitochondria kits.

Agilent introduced in April customizable kits for its SureSelect XT target-enrichment system that can capture up to 34 MB of genomic regions of interest for NGS.

Biotage launched EVOLUTE WAX, a mixed-mode weak anion exchanger developed for the extraction of strongly acidic analytes from aqueous samples.

In May, Biotage released the PRESSURE+ 96, which processes 96-well SPE plates, and the PRESSURE+ 48, which processes up to 48 SPE columns simultaneously. Both instruments utilize positive pressure for SPE and individual wells that operate independently.

Denator launched the Stabilizor Extraction Kit, the first in a series of kits for use with its heat-stabilization system. The Kit enables the extraction of endogenous peptides from tissue samples prior to analysis by LC/MS.