Company Announcements

Trovagene entered into a research agreement in June with Illumina to evaluate integrating their respective transrenal and sequencing technologies.

The CEO of Life Technologies’ Ion Torrent business, Dr. Jonathan Rothberg, resigned in June. Ronnie Andrews, president of the Genetic and Medical Sciences organization, now oversees the business.

Sage Science named Uniscience do Brasil its Brazilian distributor.

Illumina announced in July the application of the EU’s CE mark to its MiSeqDx Cystic Fibrosis System, consisting of the MiSeqDx system, two assays and software.

In July, Pathogenica and Illumina agreed to comarket in Asia Pacific a new version of Pathogenica’s HAI BioDetection kit that is compatible with Illumina’s MiSeq.

Pacific Biosciences named John F. Milligan, PhD, president and COO of Gilead Sciences, to its Board in July.

Sequencing informatics firm Bina Technologies announced in July the addition of $1.75 million to its Series B financing round, bringing the round total to $8 million.

RURO and Appistry partnered to integrate their respective LIMS 24/7 and Ayrris platforms for data management for production-scale next generation sequencing (NGS).

Life Technologies and RainTree Oncology Services entered into a collaboration agreement in August to match oncology patients to clinical trials using an NGS screening panel, develop a clinical trial recruitment database, and build and market a test and data offering for CROs.

Population Genetics Technologies assigned exclusive rights to a patent covering methods for asymmetric adaptor library construction, which enables increased efficiency at the adaptor ligation step, to New England Biolabs.

Product Introductions

Life Technologies announced in July that its new Ion AmpliSeq Exome Kit for sequencing single exomes, pairs or trios in one run requires less than 60 minutes of hands-on time, with exome enrichment and library construction in less than six hours.

Life Technologies released in August an end-to-end sequencing solution for exon-level CNV analysis, combining the Ion Reporter CNV data analysis workflow, Ion AmpliSeq Exome Kit and Ion Proton System.

Illumina introduced in July Phasing Analysis Services. Provided by its FastTrack Services lab, the Services deliver human whole-genome phase information.

In August, Illumina launched new reagent kits for the MiSeq system, which double sequencing output to 15 Gb by increasing the number of reads to as many as 25 million and overall read length to up to 2 x 300 base pairs.

Appistry released in July the Cancer Genome Analysis Suite, which includes the Broad Institute’s MuTect method for identifying somatic point mutations and Genome Analysis Toolkit.