New Partnerships, New Opportunities
This month, several agreements between major instrument industry players and smaller, “niche” manufacturers were announced. The smaller companies in these partnerships should benefit from their larger partners’ sales and distribution networks. For the larger firms, the agreements provide a variety of opportunities, including the chance to offer integrated products and approach applications with entirely new platforms.
Bruker Daltonik GmbH, the German subsidiary of Bruker Daltonics, announced an OEM agreement with Proxeon, a Danish manufacturer of proteomics instrumentation and software. Bruker Daltonik will sell Proxeon’s EASY-nLC, a nanoscale LC system, in the European market as a part of an integrated nano-LC/MS system. Sales should begin shortly, as Mårten Winge, CEO of Proxeon, explained that Bruker Daltonik’s marketing and sales departments have already made arrangements to sell the system in Europe. Of course, such a move raises questions about the possibilities of Bruker offering a nano-LC/MS in the US. Although a time frame for bringing an integrated system to the US is unknown, Mr. Winge said, “there is a high likelihood of a US launch. My impression from talking with Bruker is that they are keen to offer an integrated nano-LC/MS to add more value to their current product offerings, and that the wish to do so is true for all geographical markets.” The EASY-nLC is a product designed for the proteomics market, but Mr. Winge said that nothing prevents Bruker from marketing the system to other end-users. Mr. Winge explained that Bruker’s access to a broader market allows Proxeon to avoid the costly processes of building an international sales team or distribution network.
Other large firms have recently made similar moves by adding nano-LC to their MS product offerings. These include a partnership between Applied Biosystems and Eksigent (see IBO 11/30/05) and Thermo Fisher Scientific’s purchase of Flux Instruments AG and Spectronex AG (see IBO 1/15/07). There has been a general trend towards using nano-LC for separations on MS systems—particularly in proteomics applications, due to small sample sizes and the need to identify low-concentration proteins. Asked about the growing popularity of nano-LC, Mr. Winge said nano-LC sales are “tightly linked to MS proteomics sales,” adding that “MS proteomics is growing at a healthy pace, typically 10%–20% depending on what particular quarter you look at.” Another factor for the rise of nano-LC that Mr. Winge cited is the increased ease-of-use of nano-LC products.
Also this month, Applied Biosystems announced agreements with BioTrove, a Boston-area manufacturer of micro- and nano-scale technology for the life science and drug discovery industries that just signed a comarketing agreement with Agilent for an MS sample prep product (see IBO 10/31/07). The primary agreement is a licensing collaboration in which Applied Biosystems will sell BioTrove’s OpenArrays—3,072-well plates used for PCR—preloaded with Applied Biosystems’ TaqMan SNP Genotyping Assays. The OpenArray platform is analyzed with BioTrove’s NT Imager, which Applied Biosystems will also sell; according to the agreement, Applied Biosystems will pay BioTrove on a per sale basis. Lauren Lum, senior public relations manager with Applied Biosystems, said that the first preloaded OpenArrays should be on the market within nine to twelve months. As Kevin Munnelly, general manager of the Genomics business unit at BioTrove, explained, the first OpenArrays that Applied Biosystems plans to sell will be loaded with custom versions of the reagents. The custom SNP market has been BioTrove’s main market: “We’re really focusing in on specific regions, say, post-genome scan; usually, those are customized for the project, the population, the disease, the species or whatever it is that the researcher is looking for.” However, Mr. Munnelly added that the two companies are also looking at selling fixed content products, citing DME (drug metabolizing enzyme) genotyping assays as a promising example: “Those are very popular and are fairly standard across the pharma companies that genotype them. That would be a phenomenal, and I’m sure, very popular product.”
One of the benefits of the OpenArray for end-users is that it uses a smaller amount of reagents: while most PCR analyses use 5 µm–25 µm per reaction, the OpenArray only requires 33 nl per reaction. Ms. Lum said that this decreased reagent usage could yield savings of $0.05 to $0.60 per genotype. Another advantage of the OpenArray platform is its increased throughput, which addresses one of PCR’s major limitations when compared to competing techniques, such as microarrays. Most PCR analyses are done with 96- and 384-well plates; the OpenArray’s 3,072 wells allow PCR runs with at least eight times as many samples per plate. Mr. Munnelly said that BioTrove’s customers “see between a 4- and 100-fold reduction in project times.” Ms. Lum explained that this increased throughput would be a strong selling point for end-users conducting, for example, large-scale genotyping association studies.
Finally, Agilent announced a partnership with Philadelphia-based BioNanomatrix to develop a whole genome imaging system. BioNanomatrix’s technology is based on nanochannels, which, as Michael Boyce-Jacino, CEO of BioNanomatrix, explained, can physically unravel the dense tangle of a DNA molecule and allow it to pass through the channel in an unbroken strand. According to the agreement, BioNanomatrix will develop nanochannel chips and reagents, and Agilent—which is supporting the partnership through Agilent Laboratories’ New Business Creation group—will develop the instrumentation. Eran Raber, director of New Business Creation and Venture Investments at Agilent, said that the partnership does not have a strict time frame, but that the two companies would confirm first application possibilities for the system within the next few months and that commercialization agreements would be discussed at that point. In terms of the specific instrument technology involved in the upcoming system, Mr. Raber compared the future system to Agilent’s BioAnalyzer, saying that it would use a combination of automated microfluidics, measurement technology, imaging technology, and data acquisition and analysis.
The most likely initial applications for the system are cytogenetics and genotoxicity. Mr. Raber explained that DNA sequencing is not the immediate focus of the collaboration, but arrangements related to sequencing would be discussed in the future. In any case, he said that the system “could enable new types of applications—definitely not applications that Agilent has on the market today.” Dr. Boyce-Jacino made it clear that the BioNanomatrix’s long-term goal for its nanochannel technology is DNA sequencing.
The Agilent–BioNanomatrix collaboration marks another case of a company that has recently invested in uncommercialized technology for DNA sequencing. Like Agilent, Sequenom has entered a new technology space through its agreement with Harvard University for DNA sequencing (see page 7). Unrelated to the BioTrove collaboration, Applied Biosystems has invested in VisiGen’s single-molecule technology (see IBO 10/31/05) and Eagle Research and Development’s nanopore technology (see IBO 1/31/07). And this is not Agilent’s first foray into DNA sequencing: in 2001, it announced an investment in nanopore technology from Harvard University (see IBO 8/15/01); this research is still under way.