RainDance, Life Technologies Pen Co-Marketing Pact

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – RainDance Technologies said today that it has struck an agreement with Life Technologies under which the companies will co-market a combined solution that pairs microdroplet PCR-based sequence enrichment with next-generation sequencing.

Specifically, the companies will market RainDance's RDT 1000 Sequence Enrichment Solution with Applied Biosystems' SOLiD System next generation sequencer. The integrated technologies will enable researchers to conduct efficient, large-scale targeted sequencing studies with the accuracy and quality of PCR-based DNA amplification, RainDance said.

RainDance Chief Commercial Officer Christopher McNary said in a statement that by using the SOLiD with its technologies "researchers will be able to detect substantially higher numbers of variants in the targeted sequences than have been demonstrated with alternative approaches using less precise capture methods."

The Lexington, Mass.-based firm also said that the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) has already coupled the Sequence Enrichment Solution with the ABI SOLiD sequencing technology to study mutations in candidate genes and pathways for disease research.

"Our hope is that these tools will allow us to efficiently interrogate specific regions of the cancer genome, which in turn will ultimately lead to an increased understanding of cancer development," John Carpten, director of Integrated Cancer Genomics Division of TGen, said in the statement. "We have successfully interrogated specific regions of the genome and identified novel somatic mutations in normal/tumor pairs within a relatively short period of time."