Company Announcements

PointCross Life Sciences announced in April a strategic partnership with InterpretOmics to integrate their respective RDIS and iOmics platforms across nonclinical, clinical and genomic biomarkers for targeted drug development and patient stratification.

In May, Pacific Biosciences and RainDance Technologies partnered to codevelop and comarket novel solutions for de novo whole genome assembly. These solutions will provide sample preparation upstream of PacBio’s system.

IBM Watson Health announced collaborations with more than a dozen cancer institutes to accelerate personalized treatment options. Partners will use the cloud-based Watson Genomic Analytics service for genomic analysis.

Cypher Genomics announced a partnership with the Clinic for Special Children for a rare disease study.

The NCI’s Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice program will enroll up to one thousand patients in an oncology clinical trial using genetic sequencing information obtained with Thermo Fisher Scientific’s NGS technology.

Thermo Fisher Scientific announced a collaboration with CompanionDx to establish new NGS services.

Illumina’s NextBio knowledge base platform will be used as part of an American Society of Clinical Oncology’s clinical trial to learn the best uses of molecularly targeted cancer drugs outside of FDA-approved indications.

In June, Illumina named Pensabio as a Brazilian distributor.

Product Introductions

In May, Kapa Biosystems launched the KAPA Stranded RNA-Seq Kit with RiboErase, which uses a targeted enzymatic depletion method to remove rRNA.

New England Biolabs released a new qPCR-based NEBNext Library Quant Kit for Illumina systems.

QIAGEN introduced QIAGEN Clinical Insight content and platform for clinical testing labs to interpret and report on genomic variants identified using NGS. The first two applications are for somatic and hereditary cancer.

Fluidigm announced a new automated library preparation application for targeted sequencing utilizing its Juno system. The application can process up to 192 samples in parallel. It will be introduced in the fourth quarter.

ArcherDx launched the VariantPlex Solid Tumor Panel for detecting somatic variants in 67 genes.

In June, Lexogen launched Mix2 software for the estimation of RNA concentration from RNA-Seq data.

Sales/Orders of Note

In June, Genomics England selected the clinical interpretation providers for the results of the first 8,000 patients in its 100,000 Genomes Project: Congenica and Omicia (rare disease), Nanthealth (cancer) and WuXi Nextcode (rare disease and cancer).