Company Announcements

In November, Scipio Bioscience completed an initial fundraising round, resulting in €1.2 million ($1.3 million). The company is developing a novel sample preparation solution for single-cell studies based on barcoding in a test tube format.

NRGene announced in November a partnership with Israel’s Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center to perform genetic analysis of Parkinson’s disease using its GenoMAGIC cloud-based genomic analysis system.

In December, NRGene announced a partnership with Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands as well as commercial partners to create multi-genomic mapping of commercial food potatoes.

In December, NeoGenomics, which operates CLIA-certified labs, joined Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Next Generation Sequencing Companion Dx Center of Excellence Program.

In December, the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services proposed coverage for Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Oncomine Dx Target Test as part of a national coverage determination for NGS IVD tests. Once implemented, this would provide Medicare beneficiaries with reimbursable testing, including for clinical trials that meet a specific set of criteria.

BGI announced in December a memorandum of understanding with Germany’s Hummingbird Diagnostics to establish a broad collection in miRNA-based molecular diagnostic applications built on NGS technology. The relationship is currently centered on neurodegenerative disorders.

In December, BGI Genomics entered into a partnership with Sanguine BioSciences, a builder of data-integrated patient communities, to develop a database of combined genomic and clinical data to increase the speed and efficiency of precision clinical trial recruitment. The first project will focus on rheumatoid arthritis.

DNAnexus announced in December the availability of the DeepVariant bioinformatics tool on the DNAnexus Platform.

Oxford Nanopore announced in December the first sequencing of an over one million base sequence using its nanopore technology.

In December, public benefit corporation Luna DNA announced $2 million in seed funding. Calling its product the first genomic platform powered by the blockchain, Luna DNA’s community-owned database gives Luna Coins for contributing genomic and medical information. Investors and leadership include former Illumina executives.

Bluebee announced in December a partnership to provide a secure, convenient data processing solution for Agendia’s NGS-based MammaPrint BluePrint Breast Cancer Recurrence and Molecular Subtyping Kit.

BC Platforms announced in December a cooperation with the €59 million ($70 million) FinnGen program, which plans to study 500,000 unique blood samples collected by Finnish biobanks. BC Platforms has developed a data availability query, meta-analytics and analysis-result browsing platform for the program.

Product Introductions

In November, Edico Genome unveiled the DRAGEN Complete Suite on Amazon’s AWS Marketplace.

Edico Genome announced in December the availability of its DRAGEN pipeline with Seven Bridges’ cloud-based data ecosystem.

In December, Google announced the open source release of DeepVariant, a deep learning technology to reconstruct the true genome sequencing from high-throughput sequencing  data with greater accuracy. The variant calling platform was developed by Google Brain and Verily Life Sciences.

Thermo Fisher Scientific released the Ion Torrent Oncomine Myeloid Research Assay, which interrogates DNA mutations, RNA fusion transcripts and gene expression levels associated with myeloid cancers in a single run, yielding results in 2–3 days. It analyzes 74 genes in a single panel.

In December, Lexogen launched new Globin Block Modules for its QuantSeq kits, extending the functionality of QuantSeq 3’ mRNA-Seq Library Prep for gene expression profiling of whole blood. The kits enable globin reduction during library preparation.

Sales/Orders of Note

In December, Skyline Medical, which supplies an FDA-cleared water fluid disposal system, announced an expansion of its use of NGS through a license to Illumina’s MiSeqDx platform for use in development of its D-CHIP service platform venture with Helomics for identifying correlations between patient demographic data, tumor gene sequence and drug responses.