Company Announcements

Fluidigm in February appointed AH diagnostics as its exclusive Scandinavian distributor.

Life Technologies named Asuragen a Certified Service Provider for Ion Torrent’s Personal Genome Machine.

Pacific Biosciences’ 2011 sales rose 19.2% to $33.9 million (see page 12), as it sold 48 instruments to 45 customers. The company’s backlog was comprised of 16 instruments. As of December 31, 2011, the company had cash equivalents and investments of $177.4 million.

In February, Pacific Biosciences named DNA Link its first commercial service provider for PacBio RS sequencing in Asia. The deal was brokered by MDxK, which is Pacific Biosciences’ new Korean distributor.

Emerald BioSystems changed its name in February to Emerald Bio and appointed George Abe as CEO. He was formerly CEO of Cambridge Research and Instrumentation. The company also promoted Dr. Peter Nollert to chief technologist.

Fluidigm’s 2011 Instruments sales grew 21.6% to $25.2 million and Consumables sales rose 57.8% to $15.4 million (see IBO 3/31/12). Instrument sales volume grew 19%, primarily due to Access Array sales. The US, Europe, Japan and Asia-Pacific accounted for 53%, 26%, 10% and 9% of revenues. The five-largest customers comprised 16% of revenues. As of December 31, 2011, the firm had $13.6 million of cash and cash equivalents and $41.4 million of investments. Sales for 2012 are forecast to grow 25%–30%.

Rheonix completed a $6 million securities offering in February, according to an SEC filing.

The New York Genome Center announced in February a collaboration with Illumina to sequence the whole genomes of up to 1,000 Alzheimer’s patients.

Product Introductions

Life Technologies announced in January the Ion Proton Sequencer, which will be priced at $149,000. The Ion Proton I Chip for sequencing exomes will be available in mid-2012. The Ion Proton II Chip for sequencing whole human genomes will be available six months later and will allow the sequencing of the human genome in one day for $1,000 on a stand-alone server. The workflow includes the Ion Proton OneTouch system for automated template preparation and the Ion Proton Torrent Server platforms for primary and secondary data analysis.

In February, for its PacBio RS sequencer, Pacific Biosciences released next-generation chemistry, enhanced SMRT Cells and upgraded software, resulting in a 2x increase in average read length, 3x–4x improvement in mappable data per SMRT Cell, 50%–80% reduction in input DNA required, and consensus accuracy of 99.999% at substantially lower coverage.

The Illumina Genome Network launched in February a Cancer Analysis Service to provide cancer researchers with easily interpretable tumor/normal sequencing data.