NEW YORK, July 19 - Celera said Thursday it has signed five new subscribers to its database, and has expanded its subscription agreement with a current subscriber, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
The new subscribers are the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, University of Oxford in England, and Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University.
The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas has now expanded its existing subscription to Celera's databases to include the University of Texas Health Science Centers at Houston and San Antonio, and the University of Texas Medical Branch.
All of the institutions signed multi-year subscriptions for access to all of Celera's proprietary human, mouse, and SNP databases through the Celera Discovery system, a web-based interface that includes software tools for searching and analyzing Celera's data.
The cost of the subscriptions were not disclosed, but in the past, Celera has charged academic subscribers between $7,000 and $15,000 a year per scientist using the databases.
Last week, Celera raised eyebrows when it announced that the National Cancer Institute, of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), had signed an agreement allowing individual researchers to access the databases. The National Human Genome Research Institute, Celera's rival in sequencing the human genome, is also within NIH.