Company Announcements

Roche and the Garvan Institute of Medical Research announced in August a collaboration to develop new technologies for targeted epigenomic analysis.

New England Biolabs exclusively in-licensed rights from Genomic Health to technology for the depletion of abundant DNA using RNase H–based depletion.

Product Introductions

In August, Coveris launched the micro TUBE LV for DNA shearing, enabling the processing of samples as small as 15 µL and incorporating newly developed AFA Beads.

New England Biolabs launched the NEBNext rRNA Depletion Kit (Human/Mouse/Rat) based on Genomic Health’s technology. It is optimized for inputs as low as 10 ng total RNA.

Lucigen and Thermo Fisher Scientific released the Ion TrueMate Library Kit, which allows long mate-pair libraries up to 8 kb to be run on the PGM. The protocol and reagents are optimized to eliminate chimera formation.

Thermo Fisher Scientific released the AcroMetrix Oncology Hotspot Control for clinical next-generation sequencing (NGS) oncology QC. It can be used across labs with different NGS-instrument platforms, assays and bioinformatics pipelines and allows for the control of more than 500 hotspot mutations.

In September, Thermo Fisher Scientific launched the Ion AmpliSeq Transcriptome Solution for the Ion Proton System for mining biobanks for RNA profiles.

In August, Appistry released the Variant Annotation and Analysis Suite for identifying causal variants in NGS data, featuring VarSeeker, an enhanced version of VarSifter.

Qlucore introduced in August Omics Explorer 3.0, which supports direct import and normalization of RNA-seq data.

NuGEN Technologies launched in August its Single Primer Enrichment Technology for the detection in a single assay of all possible fusion events involving 446 cancer fusion genes. It is available as the Ovation Fusion Panel Target Enrichment System and customized gene-fusion panels.

In September, Agilent Technologies launched the ClearSeq AML, the first product in its ClearSeq line of next-generation cancer-research panels. It targets 48 selected exons in 20 of the most commonly mutated genes found in acute myeloid leukemia.

Sales/Orders of Note

The Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai selected eight Thermo Fisher Scientific Ion Proton sequencers, eight Ion Chef Systems, the Torrent Suite Variant Caller and Ampliseq Custom Panels for its new genomics research center.