Company Announcements

Swedish firm Nanosep declared bankruptcy in November 2011.

In January, Quanterix announced a strategic investment and technology agreement with In-Q-Tel for the development of its Single Molecule Array technology to enable simultaneous measurement of both nucleic acids and proteins for the detection of pathogens.

Nabsys named Stan Rose, PhD, former CEO of NimbleGen Systems, chief commercial officer in January.

Roka Bioscience secured $47.5 million in Series D financing in January, bringing its total amount raised since September 2009 to $104.7 million.

In January, Pacific Biosciences named board member Michael W. Hunkapiller, PhD, president and CEO. He is a general partner at Alloy Ventures.

In January, Pacific Biosciences appointed Bruce C. Ginsberg, president and CEO of MooBella, and Marshall Mohr, CFO of Intuitive Surgical, to its Board.

Product Introductions

GE Healthcare launched the His Capture Kit and NTA Reagent Kit for its Biacore systems.

Life Technologies released the Ion AmpliSeq Cancer Panel, a single-tube assay for sequencing 46 cancer-related genes for over 700 cancer mutations, and the Ion Sequencing 200 Kit, which was demonstrated to generate mean read lengths of 231 bases. The company will seek 510(k) clearance for the Ion Torrent system in 2012.

Life Technologies announced in December 2011 additional Life Grand Challenges competitions in three categories: sample preparation, base yield and accuracy.

In January, Life Technologies began shipping the Ion 318 chips, which deliver up to 1 Gb of DNA sequencing data per run. The company also announced the Ion AmpliSeq Custom Solutions for interrogating targeted genomic regions using 1,536 amplicons in a single tube in a day; Ion AmpliSeq Fixed Content Panels, consisting of the Inherited Disease Panel using the 316 chip and the Comprehensive Cancer Panel using the 318 chip; the Ion x 100 base, paired-end sequencing protocols; the Ion One Touch Template 200 Kits for DNA libraries with insert sizes of up to 260 base pairs for 200 base pair sequencing; and the Torrent Suite v 2.0 software.

ForteBio, a Pall company, launched in December 2011 the BLItz, which is a label-free, BioLayer Interferometry-based protein analysis system priced under $20,000. It requires only 4 µL of sample and takes up less surface area than a tablet computer.

In January, Illumina launched the HiSeq 2500 sequencer, which allows researchers to generate 120 Gb of data in 27 hours or 600 Gb in a standard HiSeq run. It is available as a field upgrade to the HiSeq 2000 for $50,000. A new 500-cycle reagent kit supports 2 x 250 base pair runs. Shipments will begin in the second half of 2012.