Company Announcements

Agilent Technologies announced in June an agreement to expand its relationship with Agendia to include the development of an RNA-Seq kit version of Agendia’s MammaPrint and BluePrint test. MammaPrint and BluePrint tests assess the risk of disease recurrence in women with early-stage breast cancer. The initial phase of development is expected to be completed in 2017, with early access to markets in Europe.

In July, Genoox, which automates data interpretation and provides data points through a search engine, announced a $6 million investment by Inimiti Capital Partners and Glilot Capital Partners.

Kailos Genetics announced in July a strategic partnership and investment from In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit investor supporting the mission of the US intelligence community.

In July, Pacific Biosciences announced an agreement with Novogen, a genomic services and solutions provider, to jointly develop and promote novel applications based on the PacBio Sequel System. New applications will focus on basic and translational research.

In July, NRGene and Genosys partnered to deliver two complete cotton genomes.

NRGene announced in July the delivery of an improved assembly of the sweet potato genome to a group of scientists in Japan, China and Korea.

Product Introductions

In March, Optra Health launched the iPhronesis Knowledge Automation for Clinical Genomics platform, using advanced neural language processing algorithms and deep machine learning. It is designed for rapid data curation, variant classification and clinical reporting.

In July, Norgen Biotek introduced a new portfolio for NGS applications, including the Small RNA Library Prep Kit for Illumina and NGS services.

Illumina announced in July the TruSeq Neurodegeneration Panel for the study of neurodegenerative diseases. It targets 118 genes.

In July, Agient Technologies introduced the Agilent SureSelect^{XT HS} target enrichment solution for total workflow management, optimized for FFPE samples. The solution integrates molecular barcodes to improve overall precision and produce higher complexity libraries than competing products. It features 90 minute hybridization.

Thermo Fisher Scientific introduced in July the Precision ID GlobalFiler NGS STR panel v2 and Converge 2.0 software for forensic DNA analysis, designed to work with the Ion Chef System, and Ion S5 and Ion S5 XL Systems. The Converge NGS Analysis module provides a wider allele range with an increased power to discriminate for individual identification.