British array firm BlueGnome this month relocated to new headquarters to keep pace with growth that has seen it double most of activities in the past year.
The new 1,000-square-meter (10,763-square-foot) facility is located at Capital Park in Fulbourn, east of Cambridge. BlueGnome's previous office was in a space half the size in Great Shelford, south of the city.
Graham Snudden, the company's chief commercial officer, told BioArray News this week that the decade-old privately held company has been expanding "very rapidly." In the past year, "most aspects" of the firm's business have doubled, he said.
Along with larger R&D labs, manufacturing capacity, and storage, BlueGnome's new site has room for new hires, as headcount has also doubled in the past year.
Snudden said that BlueGnome at the moment has 50 employees worldwide.
BlueGnome has also doubled its headcount in Singapore and in the US. The firm last year opened a Singapore office and plans to later this year establish an office in Washington, DC (BAN 10/18/2011). Snudden did not say how many employees the company has addressing the Asian and North American markets.
Founded in 2002, BlueGnome currently offers a range of comparative genomic hybridization microarrays for constitutional and cancer cytogenetic research. CytoChip Cancer targets 670 cancer genes, CytoChip ISCA follows the International Standard Cytogenetic Array consortium's consensus design, and CytoChip Focus is tailored for users with limited sample material who do not wish to perform whole-genome amplification or cell culturing.
The company also sells 24sure arrays for preimplantation genetic screening. These arrays can be used to interrogate single cells for aneuploidy during an in vitro fertilization cycle.
Agilent Technologies manufactures all of BlueGnome's oligo-based arrays. BlueGnome's CytoChip Focus and 24sure arrays use bacterial artificial chromosomes and are made on site.
Snudden said that BlueGnome's grew in all geographies in the past year, with "particular success in the Far East" and by cancer researchers.
He also said that BlueGnome's BlueFuse software has been a "major driver" of this growth.
"As data generation is increasingly seen as a commodity the real value is delivering a scalable data management capability," said Snudden.
Oxford Gene Technology, another British firm that sells arrays for cytogenetic research, also touts its CytoSure Interpret software as a selling point. OGT plans to launch a menu of arrays for cancer cytogenetics research this year (BAN 3/6/2012).
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