NEW YORK, Oct 17 - A day after setting a proposed price range for its imminent IPO, DoubleTwist said Tuesday that it has extended its Asia-Pacific distribution alliance with Hitachi.
DoubleTwist originally announced an Asia-Pacific software distribution agreement with Hitachi in June. In this alliance, DoubleTwist granted the Japanese company exclusive distribution rights to its Clustering and Alignment Tool (CAT) for the year 2000 and non-exclusive distribution rights through September 2000 for Prophecy, the DoubleTwist annotated human genome database and associated software.
“This deal is different because it goes to the entire suite of our products,” said DoubleTwist spokeswoman Catherine Collier. “In June the agreement was only for a few products.”
The current and more comprehensive agreement gives Hitachi exclusive rights to distribute and market the DoubleTwist.com research portal and an expressed sequence database visualization tool called GeneForest, along with CAT and Prophecy.
The agreement expires Sept. 30, 2001 but is automatically renewed for successive one-year terms unless terminated by either party with at least 60 days notice.