Santa Clara, CA 7/24/17; Cambridge, UK 7/24/17—Agilent Technologies, a supplier to the life science, diagnostics and applied chemicals markets, has acquired Population Genetics Technologies’ (PGT) molecular and sample barcoding patent portfolios. Financial details were not disclosed. The acquired patents include those for molecular and sample barcoding for NGS detection, and enable a customized target enrichment solution for detection of ultra-low mutation frequencies in very small quantities of DNA. The acquired patents include US Patent No. 8,481,292 (Increasing Confidence of Allele Calls with Molecular Counting). “We outlined a strategy to grow in the diagnostics space, and to build a complete routine clinical NGS workflow,” stated Jacob Thaysen, president of Agilent’s Diagnostics and Genomics Group. “This acquisition is another example of executing on that strategy, and our commitment to helping our customers improve the quality of life.” Agilent’s previous licensing agreement with PGT involved molecular barcode technology that is integrated into the Agilent SureSelect^{XT HS} library preparation solution. PGT retains exclusive rights to the technology for infectious disease diagnostics and nonexclusive rights for veterinary diagnostics and plant genomics.

 Molecular barcoding enables detection of experimental artifacts, such as amplification bias, enabling higher-quality NGS results. The technology can detect rare variants down to ≤ 1%, according to Agilent. Sample barcodes allow for multiplexing of samples for NGS. PGT’s patents also include the Reflex method for long-read targeted sequencing and phase determination. PGT licensed its VeriTag technology, based on the above patent, to Agilent in 2013 (see IBO 2/15/14).