Company Announcements

Thermo Fisher Scientific announced in July a partnership with the CDC’s Special Bacteriology Reference Laboratory and the development of the MicrobeBridge software platform to seamlessly connect Sanger sequencing to the MicrobeNet database. Thermo also plans to develop compatible software for its NGS and MS platforms.

In June, Contextual Genomics and Canada’s Personalized Medicine Initiative announced that Illumina joined its National Access Project for cancer testing, which aims to make genomic testing a standard practice in cancer care.

10X Genomics selected Kapa Biosystems as the reagent supplier for its GemCode Platform.

Pacific Biosciences named Macrogen of Korea as a certified service provider.

Pacific Biosciences expanded its collaboration with A*STAR’s Genome Institute of Singapore for efforts to advance research in infectious diseases, genomics, sequence analysis and translational health care in Singapore. The initial formal collaboration ended earlier this year.

Product Introductions

Exiqon launched in June the XploreRNA cloud computing environment, which brings together applications for RNAseq data analysis with custom assay design capabilities in one integrated workflow supported by an e-commerce system.

In July, BioBam and Biomatters released an integrated plug-in on the Geneious platform for functionally annotating and interpreting novel sequences.

Asuragen introduced the Quantidex Pan Cancer Kit, covering 21 genes, and featuring a streamlined wet bench protocol and push-button analysis software.

SeraCare Life Sciences launched the Seraseq Solid Tumor Mutation Mix-I (AF20), a biosynthetic reference material designed to evaluate the performance of NGS-based tumor profiling assays. The first version consists of 26 major cancer hotspot genes.

Illumina released BaseSpace OnSite 2.0, which now supports the NextSeq 500 and HiSeq 2500.

Illumina introduced SeqLab, an integrated solution for customers with HiSeq X systems to enable large-scale human whole-genome sequencing operations. It includes GenoLogics’ Clarity LIMS X Edition, Hamilton Robotics’ Microlab STAR liquid handling robots, and Illumina’s HiSeq Analysis Software v2.0 and SeqLab Consulting Service.

In July, GenoLogics released Clarity LIMS X for population-level, human whole-genome sequencing, which is optimized for use with Illumina’s SeqLab.

Sales/Orders of Note

DNAnexus announced in June that Stanford University, the Data Coordination Center for the ENCODE Project, adopted its cloud genomics platform to support data analysis and sharing for Phase 3 of the Project.