Company Announcements

Ultrasonix Medical agreed in September to supply Bioscan with specialized ultrasound imaging products for use in the preclinical imaging market.

Illumina entered into a strategic alliance with Partners Healthcare in September to offer medical geneticists and pathologists infrastructure and networking tools to support the interpretation and reporting process for genetic sequencing data. The firms will integrate the functionality of their respective MiSeq system and FDA-registered GeneInsight Suite IT platform.

Pacific Biosciences named Lucy Shapiro, PhD, to its Board. She is the Virginia and DK Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research at Stanford University and director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine.

The National Human Genome Research Institute announced in September its annual grants for the Advanced DNA Sequencing Technology Program. Private recipients were Genapsys ($1.2 million); GnuBIO ($1.5 million); Intel, the University of Twente, Columbia University and Pacific Biosciences ($1.2 million); and Northeastern University and Pacific Biosciences ($300,000).

Life Technologies agreed to exclusively comarket and distribute Pathogenica’s HAI (hospital acquired infection) BioDetection Kit for use with the Ion Torrent PGM in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The kits are not for use in the diagnosis of hospital patients.

Product Introductions

Bioscan launched in September the BioSONIC WAVE and BioSONIC VIEW preclinical molecular imaging systems, featuring easy co-registration of three-dimensional ultrasound with other imaging modalities and imaging.

Mediso Medical Imaging introduced the nanoScan in-line integrated preclinical single-photon emission computed tomography/MRI imaging system, which features Aspect Imaging’s cryogen-free M2 MRI system and greater sensitivity and resolution.

In September, Life Technologies released Torrent Suite Software 3.0, which consistently delivers 99.99+% consensus accuracy for short and long homopolymer regions, and 400 base sequencing kits, which support two long-read runs per day.

Illumina released TruSight content sets for its MiSeq system for autism, cancer, cardiomyopathy, inherited diseases and the exome. In the first half of 2013, customers will be able to augment the sets with custom content.

Protein Simple released the Peggy system to replace western blotting. The system separates proteins by size or by charge and identifies and quantifies them using capillary electrophoresis and an immunoassay.

Life Technologies began shipping the Ion Proton System in September. Using the Ion PI Chip, it can sequence exomes and transcriptomes in two to four hours. Initially, the system delivers 60–80 million filtered reads and up to 10 Gb in output. Read lengths are 100–200 bp.