Company Announcements

In January, Agilent Technologies named Alacris Theranostics as an Agilent Certified Service Provider for target enrichment.

PreAnalytiX, NuGEN Technologies and RUCDR Infinite Biologics partnered to validate an end-to-end workflow for the reproducible collection and processing of whole blood for RNA-Seq in clinical studies.

In February, Japan’s Quantum Biosystems announced that it raised ¥2.4 billion ($20.4 million) in Series B funding to develop its DNA/RNA sequencer. Bloomberg reported the company plans a US or Japanese IPO later this year and intends to commercialize the system in 2017.

Bioo Scientific formed a partnership with the Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to bring to market randomized adapter technology to reduce ligation bias in next-generation sequencing (NGS). The technology is part of its NEXTflex Small RNA-Seq Library Prep Kit v2.

Maverix Biomics entered into a strategic cooperation agreement with Elsevier to streamline the interpretation of raw NGS data by completing Pathway Studies’ workflow and incorporating data from Elsevier’s biology journals.

Product Introductions

Thermo Fisher Scientific introduced in January the CE-IVD Oncomine Solid Tumor DNA kit for multiplexed sequencing of FFPE tumor samples. The kit allows detection of single-nucleotide somatic changes, inversions, insertions and deletions using as little as 10 ng of FFPE DNA. The panel was verified by clinicians from the OncoNetwork Consortium with a focus on colon and lung cancers.

Thermo Fisher Scientific launched the Ion Torrent AmpliSeq RNA Fusion Lung Cancer Research Panel for targeted sequencing of fusion transcripts for clinical research.

LifeMap Sciences released the VarElect for prioritizing gene variants from NGS experiments.

Partek introduced Partek Flow 4.0 for NGS alignment, analysis and visualization. The mobile cloud-computing solution’s new features include multifactor mixed-model ANOVA.

Illumina launched the MiSeq FGx Forensic Genomics System, a fully validated NGS system that simultaneously interrogates STRs and other valuable genetic markets to provide informative DNA profiles. The system includes the ForenSeq DNA Signature Prep Kit and ForenSeq Universal Analysis Software.

GenomeNext released an SaaS-developed NGS analysis engine for cost-effective, deterministic results.

New England BioLabs introduced NEBNext FFPE DNA Repair Mix for sequencing FFPE tissue samples by repairing the DNA in FFPE samples ahead of library preparation and sequencing.

Bioo Scientific released the NEXTflex Pre- and Post- Capture Combo Kit (Agilent SureSelectXT2 Compatible), an Illumina-compatible library-preparation solution.