Company Announcements

Agilent and BGI announced in February a collaboration to develop methods for next-generation genome-wide association studies, with the goal of creating a next-generation super exome using Agilent’s SureSelect technology.

In March, Pressure Biosciences named LA Biosystems its exclusive distributor for the Benelux countries.

Pressure Biosciences is collaborating with Sage-N Research to develop software applications on its SORCERER Integrated Data Appliance platform, which companies will comarket as a bundled platform.

In March, Denator completed a sixth round of financing, raising SEK 2.5 million ($371,107).

In March, Asuragen received a $6.8 million commercialization award from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas and, as part of the award, is collaborating with MD Anderson Cancer Center to apply its targeted next-generation sequencing strategy to tumors.

Product Introductions

Fluidigm introduced in February a custom assay design service for amplicon resequencing on Illumina platforms, which utilizes Access Array Target-Specific Primers for preparation of up to 480 amplicons per sample.

Covaris launched the compact, cost-effective M220 Ultrasonicator for shearing DNA into random fragments ranging in size from 200 bp to 3.0 kb.

New England Biolabs launched the NEBNext Oligo Modules for the construction of singleplex or multiplex high-yield libraries for Illumina sequencers.

Shimadzu Scientific Instruments and Perfinity Biosciences introduced the Perfinity Integrated Digestion Platform for the automated integration of buffer exchange, digestion, desalting and reverse-phase separation.

Waters launched the MV-10 ASFE System, a multivessel, semi-automated supercritical fluid extraction system.

In March, SiliCycle launched the SiliaPrepX family of polymeric SPE cartridges and well plates.

In March, Agilent released a new version of the HaloPlex target enrichment system, which can run in less than six hours, compared to the previous 24-hour run time. It requires 22 ng of input DNA and comes with 96 indexes.

In March, Illumina released the multiplexed TruSeq Amplicon – Cancer Panel, with the ability to detect mutations below 5% frequency. It began shipping in April.

In March, Life Technologies introduced the multiplexed Ion AmpliSeq Custom Panels, which requires 10 ng of input DNA and three-and-a-half hours for library construction, and the Ion AmpliSeq Designer online application, with which panels can be designed for up to 250 Kb in size, expanding to 1 Mb later this year.

In April, RainDance Technologies launched the Cancer Hotspot Panel for cancer mutation–screening research for the simultaneous interrogation of more than 13,000 cancer “hotspots” across 54 genes.