Company Announcements

In March, Swift Bioscience partnered with TATAA Biocenter, which now distributes its NGS products in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Austria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

In March, 10x Genomics closed a $55 million Series C financing, led by Fidelity Management & Research.

Huawei and WuXi AppTec announced a strategic alliance to support the Chinese Precision Medicine Initiative through the creation of a precision medicine cloud platform.

HTG Molecular Diagnostics signed a long-term agreement with Thermo Fisher Scientific to develop a number of IVD tests for use with the Ion PGM Dx system.

Lasergen named Timothy Burcham, PhD, as CTO and added three seats to its Board for Agilent Technologies (see IBO 3/15/16).

In April, Seven Bridges signed a Collaborative Research and Development Agreement with the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to support two initiatives of the VA’s Million Veteran Program: the Hybrid Cloud project to establish an automated execution framework, and the Genotype-Phenotype Graph Analysis Engine to create a unified graph data structure. Lockheed Martin is also an industrial collaborator.

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard announced a collaboration with Amazon Web Services, Cloudera, Google, IBM, Intel and Microsoft to enable cloud-based access to its Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK) software package.

GenomeDx Biosciences announced seven agreements with leading cancer centers to provide access to its Genomics Resource Information Database, a urologic cancer genome expression database.

Product Introductions

In March, Ambry Genetics launched what it called the “largest free, disease-specific public database of human genome sequencing data.” The information released consists of aggregated data of 10,000 humane genomes (exomes) focused on hereditary breast and ovarian cancer.

Agilent Technologies released OneSight, a software platform for visualizing and analyzing chromosomal aneuploidies in cell-free DNA sequencing data.

Illumina announced in April new consulting service offerings: the Proof-of-Concept Service, Genomics IT Consulting Service, Instrument Qualification and Compliance, Hands-on Training, and Bioinformatics Professional Services.

Illumina launched the BaseSpace Suite of genomics software tools, a unified, comprehensive platform for lab information management, analysis, sharing, sample interpretation, reporting and advanced cohort analytics.

Clontech Laboratories and Fluidigm introduced the SMART-Seq v4 Ultra Low Input RNA Kit for the Fluidigm C1 System. It is available for 2 and 10 Integrated Fluidic Circuits.