Company Announcements

Rubicon Genomics completed a $2 million growth capital financing in July. Company sales grew 40% in the first half of the year.

In July, Oxford Nanopore Technologies raised £70 million ($109 million) in new funding through a private placement of ordinary shares, bringing its total funds raised to £251 million ($392 million).

In August, Contextual Genomics and the Personalized Medicine Initiative added ArcherDx as a sixth consortium partner of Canada’s National Access Project for Cancer Testing, which provides free cancer genomics testing.

Illumina, Warburg Pincus and Sutter Hill formed Helix, a company to empower consumers to discover insights into their genomes through an ecosystem of content partners. Helix received over $100 million in financing commitments, and Illumina CEO Jay Flatley serves as chairman. Its first two collaborators are the Center for Individualized Medicine at Mayo Clinic and LabCorp. In 2016, Helix is expected to be $0.10 dilutive to Illumina’s non-GAAP EPS guidance.

Appistry’s GenomePilot platform is now available on Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace. Appistry will collaborate with Microsoft on cloud-based genomics services.

Product Introductions

Bioo Scientific launched in July the NEXTflex-HT Barcodes, single-index barcodes for Illumina sequencing.

In August, NuGEN Technologies introduced Ovation Cancer Panel 2.0 Target Enrichment System, optimized for analysis of SNPs, mutations and copy number changes in over 500 cancer gene targets on Illumina systems.

Oxford Gene Technology released the hybridization-based SureSeq Ovarian Cancer Panel and SureSeq NGS Library Preparation Kit.

InterpretOmics launched HLAScape NGS software for organ transplants. It will be offered for free to academic institutes, public research institutes and public hospitals.

PierianDx launched the Clinical Genomicist Workstation 3.0 for exome sequencing, which provides clinical insight for somatic cancer as well as constitutional assays.

ArcherDX introduced the Archer PreSeq QC Assays, which use qPCR to assess the quality of nucleic acid in FFPE samples prior to library creation.

Sales/Orders of Note

In August, N-of-One signed an agreement to provide clinical interpretation for China-based GenomeCare’s comprehensive oncology panels.

DNAnexus received a R&D contract from the US FDA to build precisionFDA, an open source for community sharing of genomic information.

The US Defense Forensic Science Center will use Battelle’s Exact ID forensics genomics software.