Company Announcements

Illumina and Agilent entered into a comarketing agreement in April for their respective Genome Analyzer and SureSelect Target Enrichment System.

In March, Luminex settled litigation related to its Molecular Diagnostics business brought by The Research Foundation for the State University of New York and the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, alleging failure to pay royalties. The settlement included a one-time cash payment of $4.35 million and no admission of fault.

Ambry Genetics obtained Illumina CSPro certification for Genome Analyzer Sequencing.

In May, Genetix acquired SlidePath for cash and shares worth up to €3.7 million ($5.4 million). SlidePath provides products for the analysis, management and viewing of tissue and cellular samples via the Internet for digital pathology. SlidePath had 2008 sales of €1.3 million ($1.9 million) and a loss before taxes of €0.5 million ($0.7 million).

Solid-state DNA sequencer developer NABsys closed a $4 million equity round, led by Point Judith Capital.

Population Genetics Technologies, a developer of technology for population genotyping, secured £2 million ($3 million) in Series A funding in May.

Transgenomic appointed Antonius P. Schuh, PhD, CEO of Sorrento Therapeutics, and Michael B. McNulty, general manager of Diagnostics at Agilent, to its Board.

Pacific Biosciences named Dr. Eric Schadt, PhD, former executive scientific director of Genetics for Rosetta Inpharmatics, chief scientific officer in May.

Product Introductions

Axela introduced the dotLab Amine Reactive Sensor for stable covalent coupling of affinity reagents for use with the dotLab system.

VisEn Medical launched FMT Multi-Modality imaging adapters for combining imaging approaches. The company also announced that a four channel-version of its FTM 2500 Quantitative Tomography Platform, which adds 635 nm and 790 nm wavelengths, will be available this summer.

In April, Agilent introduced the Agilent 7100 Capillary Electrophoresis (CE) system, stating that it is 10–20 times more sensitivity than other CE systems.

Illumina launched new software for the Genome AnalyzerIIX that enables base calling and quality assessment on the instrument-control workstation.

Sales/Orders of Note

Illumina announced in April that the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard acquired 22 additional Genome Analyzers, bringing the Institute’s installed base to 47 units.

The Beijing Genomics Institute purchased 12 additional Genome Analyzers from Illumina, bringing its installed base to 29 units.