Company Announcements

In June, RainDance Technologies named Chairman Kathy Ordoñez as CEO. She was previously CEO of Celera.

In July, Thermo Fisher Scientific and DuPont Nutrition & Health renewed their distribution agreement for Western Europe, allowing Thermo Fisher to maintain exclusive supply of DuPont’s BAX System Q7 platform in the region for at least the next three years. Thermo Fisher will also continue to exclusively supply it in Australia and New Zealand and nonexclusively in Canada.

In August, VWR announced a distribution agreement for Transgenomic’s ICEme Mutation Enrichment Kits in North America.

In August, SYGNIS appointed Heikki Lackriet, PhD, current CEO of Expedeon, as co-CEO and the newly created position of CSO.

Product Introductions

In June, Bioline, a Meridian Bioscience company, launched the MyTaq Plant-PCR Kit, offering highly specific, direct PCR from a wide range of plant leaf samples.

Seegene introduced in June the Universal SG Fluorescence Oligo System for real time PCR. IT enables detection of hundreds of different targets of interest using only one Universal SG Fluorescence-labeled oligo. It is available through a PCR reagent service program.

Empirical Bioscience released in June the RTScript cDNA Synthesis Kit for qPCR and PCR. It contains all the reagents for first strand cDNA synthesis.

In June, Transgenomic announced plans to expand its ICE COLD-PCR (ICP)-powered cancer assays 10 fold over the next 18 months. The focus will continue to be on actionable mutations relevant to cancer treatment decisions.

SYGNIS announced in July the launch of TruePrime Single Cell WGS Kit V2 for whole genome amplification from a boarder range of cell types and an increased number of applications due to new lysis conditions.

In July, Bio-Rad Laboratories introduced the ddPCR CHO Residual DNA Quantification Kit and the ddPCR E. coli Residual DNA Quantification Kit to simplify the quantification of host-cell DNA in process development, QC and biomanufacturing processes.

In August, Bio-Rad Laboratories launched an assay website that allows ddPCR users to locate existing assays or design new ones for mutation detection and copy number determination. Bio-Rad also offers a combined assay format for mutation detection that includes both mutant and wild-type assays in a single tube.