Company Announcements

Life Technologies appointed Jay Therrien as vice president, Global Sales for Next Generation Sequencing. Most recently, he served as director of Sales for Asia Pacific and Japan at Illumina.

Fluidigm appointed Nano Gen Teknolojileri as its exclusive distributor for the BioMark and EP1 Systems in Turkey.

GE formed the “GE Healthyimagination Fund,” an equity fund for investing in health care technology companies that will target three areas: broad-based diagnostics, health care information technology, and life sciences.

Sequenom named Paul Maier, an independent financial consultant, interim CFO in November.

Sequenom entered into a license and settlement agreement with Ibis Biosciences related to its patent infringement suit against the company (see IBO 12/15/08). Ibis made a $1 million payment to Sequenom and Sequenom granted Ibis a license to three MS-based patents.

PerkinElmer and Corning signed a strategic agreement to develop label-free detection technologies for life science research.

Life Technologies and the University of Cambridge are collaborating to advance targeted medical resequencing and whole transcriptome analysis research studies.

The Taiwan-based cracker team of researchers has entered the competition for the Archon X Prize for Genomics for sequencing 100 human genomes within 10 days for less than $10,000 per genome. It is developing a fluorescence-based optical technology and three-tiered chip.

Product Introductions

Illumina launched the automated cBot plug-and-play system for clonal amplification of sequencing libraries, claiming that the process of creating sequencing templates can be completed in four hours.

Life Technologies introduced the SOLiD 3 Plus System, which can generate 50 Gb of mappable sequence data per run at a 20% lower cost per sequencing for a 50% decrease in cost per gigabase, according to the company. It features BioScope software, which allows the export of data into standard base sequence format.

In October, Applied Biosystems, part of Life Technologies, released the 3500 Series Genetic Analyzer, a capillary electrophoresis system for running up to 1,100 sequencing or 1,200 genotyping samples per day.

Caliper Life Sciences released a new GLP/GMP-compliant version of its operating software for the LabChip GX that is amenable to QC environments.

Sales/Orders of Note

In November, Illumina announced the sale of 30 additional Genome Analyzers to the Broad Institute, bringing the Institute’s total installed base of Genome Analyzers to 89.