Company Announcements

In July, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US Department of Commerce has decided not to pursue a request from two US senators to investigate the sale of DNA sequencers by Thermo Fisher Scientific to the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, stating that the sales were not in violation of US licensing regulations preventing sales of “surveillance and crime control” instruments to non-American allies.

In August, AI firm Bioz partnered with Covaris. Using Bioz software, Covaris will display relevant citations on its product pages.

HTG Molecular Diagnostics completed in August a masters agreement with Oncologie to develop biomarkers for Oncologie’s immuno-oncology pipeline.

In August, HTG Molecular Diagnostics named Michelle Griffin, founder of Pacific Biotechnology Consulting, to its Board.

BC Platforms partnered with Finnish genetic technology company Negen in August. Negen will use BC Platforms’ solution to provide detailed insights into raw genomic data for clinical reporting capabilities, including the rapid integration of Negen’s genetic risk scoring tools.

BC Platforms partnered in August with Proteus Genomics, a clinical reference lab specializing in pharmacogenomics.

In August, BGI signed a memo of understanding with Xing Technologies to optimize DNA nanoball sequencing technology, CTC technology and point-of-care products.

BGI announced in August a cooperation agreement with Thailand’s Chulabhorn Royal Academy and Eastern Economic Corridor office to work together to establish a precision medicine national platform in Thailand’s eastern economic corridor.

In August, the China National Drug Administration cleared the first Illumina instrument, the MiSeq Dx Sequencing System, allowing sale of the system to hospitals and other medical institutions for IVD testing.

Blockchain firm Nebula Genomics announced in August that it has raised $4.3 million in seed financing. The company also announced a partnership with Veritas Genetics to connect the Nebula marketplace to Veritas’ Arvados open-source software platform.

Product Introductions

In August, Oxford Gene Technology launched an update to its SureSeq Interpret software, which is included with purchases of SureSeq NGS panels. The update features comprehensive filtering framework enabling analysis workflows to be standardized, and allows variant filtering to be overlaid to meet analytical criteria.

NRGene released in August a comprehensive soy genome diversity haplotype database based on results from its GenoMAGIC platform. The database contains de novo assemblies and all-to-all comparison of 34 varieties of soybeans.

NuGEN Technologies introduced in August a new mRNA-Seq library preparation kit integrated with the NuQuant library quantification method. The NuQuant method eliminates the need to serially dilute libraries and estimate library size.

In August, Swift Biosciences announced early access availability of the Swift Amplicon HS Panels, a new targeted amplicon library preparation kit for NGS of liquid biopsy samples.