Company Announcements

Nabsys named Anthony Shuber as vice president and CSO in October. He was previously CTO and vice president of Ignyta.

Under an October agreement with Illumina, HTG Molecular Diagnostics will have the right to develop IVD test kits that utilize Illumina sequencing technology.

Sequenta and Illumina agreed in November to commercialize an IVD kit that enables clinical labs to utilize Sequenta’s minimal-residual-disease detection and quantification technology. Illumina also participated in the company’s Series D funding round.

BioMérieux and Illumina signed an exclusive agreement to launch an NGS epidemiology solution for service labs. They will jointly develop applications for microbiology sequencing technologies within a four-year renewable period. The first application will be for genotyping disease agents using Illumina’s MiSeq system.

Illumina partnered with the US Agency for International Development, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to train personnel to sequence viral genomes from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and extend surveillance operations. Facilities in West Africa will be equipped with genome sequencing technology.

Under a strategic partnership, World Fusion and Lumenogix integrated their respective Life Sciences Knowledge Bank and Bioinformatics-in-a-Box for NGS.

Product Introductions

Epigentek introduced in October the EpiSonic 2000, designed for simultaneous processing of 1–12 samples at small microliter-level volumes.

Omicia integrated Phevor (phenotype-driven variant ontological ranking tool) into its Opal product line, allowing direct integration of patient symptoms and condition information to further prioritize genetic variants.

Thermo Fisher Scientific launched the Ion 16S Metagenomics Kit for use with the Ion PGM System to provide for an end-to-end NGS genotyping solution that enables culture-free assessment of complex bacterial populations.

Roche launched the SeqCap RNA Target Enrichment System for RNASeq applications, including a comprehensive IncRNA design and custom enrichment offerings.

In November, Enzymatics introduced the FusionPlex NTRK and FGFR assays to detect and identify fusions and mutations without prior knowledge of breakpoints or fusion partners from minute amounts of various sample types.

Sage Science introduced the PippinHT, a high-throughput version of the Pippin line of automated DNA size-selection instruments, for 24 samples per run.

Lab7 Systems released BioBuilds 2014.11, an expansion of the BioBuilds library, and launched BioBuilds.org. BioBuilds is a curated and versioned reference collection of open-source bioinformatics tools for genomics.