Company Announcements

Real Time Genomics and Omicia entered into a commercial partnership in April to deliver genomic analysis and interpretation, respectively, in a single workflow for the clinical interpretation of childhood diseases. The integrated product will be launched later this year.

Life Technologies partnered with Ridom in April to make SeqSphere+ whole-genome bacterial typing software available for Ion Personal Genome Machine users.

Life Technologies and Aridhia are commercial partners in the Stratified Medicine Scotland Innovation Centre, an academia, industry and government collaboration.

Precision System Science (PSS) announced in May that Roche terminated its agreement for PSS to develop and manufacture a fully automated emulsion PCR instrument for next generation sequencing (NGS). The company estimates only a minor effect on fiscal year results.

In May, Illumina announced collaborations with Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, Eppendorf, Hamilton Robotics, PerkinElmer and Tecan to develop automated methods for TruSeq and Nextera Sample Preparation kits. The partners will develop, distribute and install the methods on customers’ robots and provide technical support.

Pacific Biosciences signed in May a comarketing partnership for Sage Science’s BluePippin size selection platform.

Pacific Biosciences appointed Uniscience do Brasil its exclusive Brazilian distributor.

Product Introductions

Appistry released in March the first fully supported commercial version of the Broad Institute’s Genome Analysis Toolkit. The firm is also making the source code to the software available to customers.

CLC bio and IBM introduced in April a combined turnkey end-to-end NGS data analytics solution.

In April, Pacific Biosciences launched the PacBio RS II sequencer, which can generate average read lengths of 5,000 base pairs, with the longest reads above 20,000 base pairs in length, and doubles the number of simultaneously observable sequencing reactions. New analysis software includes automated de novo assembly.

In May, Clontech Laboratories introduced the SMARTer Universal Low Input RNA Kit for Sequencing for facilitating RNA-Seq from degraded total RNA samples.

Bioo Scientific released the NEXTflex qRNA-Seq Kit for gene expression analysis by RNA-Seq using molecular indexing. It was developed with Cellular Research.

In May, Real Time Genomics and Knome integrated their respective Variant platform and knoSYS 100 interpretation system.

Illumina launched the BaseSpace cloud computing and storage platform, featuring an e-commerce system for purchase of Illumina and third-party bioinformatics applications.