CARLSBAD, Calif — Life Technologies Corporation (NASDAQ: LIFE) today launched Ion AmpliSeq™ Custom Panels that will transform disease research by unlocking hundreds of thousands of precious archived research samples containing low amounts of DNA from repositories around the globe. The highest multiplexed PCR-based solution on the market with a one-day workflow, Ion AmpliSeq™ Custom Panels require only 10 ng of input DNA and 3.5 hours for library construction – 100 times less DNA and twice as fast as other technologies. Ion AmpliSeq™ Designer, a new online application, also enables scientists to easily design and order the panels for the world’s fastest-selling benchtop sequencer – the Ion Personal Genome Machine (PGM™).

“We are at a tipping point in genetics, particularly in cancer research,” said Dr. Jonathan M. Rothberg, Founder and CEO of Ion Torrent. “With Ion AmpliSeq Custom Panels, scientists can analyze all their genes of interest in a single day using only 10 ng of input DNA. No other available technology can match this level of speed and simplicity. Custom AmpliSeq enables discovery of key driver mutations in oncology samples and offers a path for use beyond research laboratories.”

The Ion AmpliSeq technology enables custom targeted resequencing from samples with very low amounts of DNA such as formalin fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) tissue. This gives scientists the flexibility to analyze mutations in tens to hundreds of genes implicated in many different disease states, more simply and economically than ever before.

Ion AmpliSeq™ Designer extensively leverages Life Technologies’ TaqMan® assay design pipeline to create optimized gene panels. Panels can be designed in as little as 2.5 hours for regions up to 250 Kb in size, expanding to 1 Mb later in 2012, and may contain up to 1,536 amplicons per reaction. Ion Torrent’s intuitive data analysis methods enable rapid scaling from analyzing just a few genes to hundreds of genes – all in a single day.

Ion AmpliSeq™ Designer builds upon the well-received Ion AmpliSeq™ Cancer Panel, which has accelerated cancer research for scientists like Dr. Sean Grimmond, Professor at the Queensland Centre for Medical Genomics. Dr. Grimmond said: “We have been using custom AmpliSeq as a means to rapid screen the prevalence of mutations in a series of novel pancreatic cancer genes we have found through exome sequencing as part of the International Cancer Genome Consortium. AmpliSeq is an excellent validating tool in cancer genome studies due to its speed, minimal template requirements and its overall robustness.”

Watch an introduction and an in-depth explanation of the Ion AmpliSeq™ Custom Panels and the Ion AmpliSeq™ Designer. For more information, visit www.ampliseq.com.

The above referenced products are for Research Use Only. Not intended for human diagnostics purposes.