Roche will continue development of its sequence capture and peptide array products, despite recently announced plans to dissolve its Applied Science business area.
A company spokesperson told BioArray News via email this week that both programs will remain intact following a planned restructuring that will see the company eliminate up to 170 positions in Germany and the US, many connected with its sequencing business.
Following the planned restructuring at the end of the year, Roche will fold its Applied Science product lines, including its sequence capture and peptide array platforms, into its Diagnostics business.
Roche's sequence capture and peptide array programs are based on technology the Swiss company acquired when it bought Madison, Wis.-based microarray vendor Roche NimbleGen in 2007. While most of NimbleGen's array products were discontinued last year, Roche's Madison site has continued to develop and sell sequence capture products, and has been making a high-density peptide array platform available to select researchers ahead of a planned market launch (BAN 9/18/2012).
The Roche spokesperson confirmed that the company continues to work on its peptide array platform, and views it as a "highly innovative technology" that addresses "a lot of unmet needs from life science researchers." The company has not yet provided a timeline for when the platform could become more widely available.
As for sequence capture, the spokesperson said that the business will "continue to be a strong player in the life science market segment" and that it "provides us the strong base that is needed to further invest in that business."
While Roche's initial sequence capture products were originally made available on arrays, the company later configured its oligo array manufacturing capabilities to provide in-solution products for automated, higher-throughput applications. Roche stopped offering on-array sequence capture last year (BAN 10/2/2012).