Company Announcements

Agilent Technologies is collaborating with Australia’s University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research on oral cancer research. The Centre will use Agilent’s SureSelect target enrichment system.

In December 2013, Appistry added new Broad Institute tools for next generation sequencing (NGS) analysis to its Cancer Genome Analysis Suite, including the ContEst tool for estimating cross contamination in tumor/normal samples.

Pacific Biosciences, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Public Health England (PHE) are collaborating to sequence 3,000 bacterial genome strains from the PHE’s National Collection of Type Cultures.

Life Technologies and the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology announced in December 2013 the Saudi Human Genome Program to study the genetic basis of diseases in the nation and the Middle East. The network will consist of 10 genome centers that will use Life’s Ion Proton sequencer to sequence 100,000 human genomes over five years. Five more centers will be added.

Life Technologies named five new American, five new European and two new Asia-Pacific members of its Ion AmpliSeq Exome Certified Service Provider program.

Under a December 2013 partnership agreement, Kapa Biosystems will custom manufacture NGS library preparation products for Roche NimbleGen. The offering combines the companies’ respective KAPA Library Preparation Kits and sequence capture products for complete workflow coverage.

Sales of Rubicon Genomics’ ThruPLEX-FD Prep Kits and PicoPLEX WGA Kits grew 85% in 2013.

Genome analysis software firm Tute Genomics raised $1.5 million in Seed Round funding.

DNA data management firm DNAnexus closed a $15 million Series C funding round in January.

In January, NGS software provider Maverix Biomics closed a $6 million Series A funding round.

WaferGen Bio-systems acquired IntegenX’s NGS library preparation business in January for $2.0 million in cash, a $1.25 million secured promissory note, earn-out payments and the assumption of certain liabilities. In addition, Robert Schueren, CEO of IntegenX, and William McKenzie, former vice president and general manager of Molecular Diagnostics at PerkinElmer, joined WaferGen’s Board. Four Board members stepped down.

Analytical genome interpretation company Omicia closed a $6.8 million Series A financing in January.

Product Introductions

Integrated DNA Technologies launched the xGen Universal Blocking Oligos for target capture experiments.

In December 2013, Agilent introduced the RNA ScreenTape and D1000 ScreenTape quality control assays for its 2200 TapeStation system.