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In Brief This Week: Pacific Biosciences, Macrogen, Dovetail Genomics, Bionano Genomics, More

NEW YORK – Pacific Biosciences and South Korea’s Macrogen said this week that they have opened a joint laboratory at the A*STAR Genome Institute of Singapore. The lab will offer the local research community access to two PacBio Revio long-read sequencing systems. Macrogen will provide sequencing service support. Financial and other details of the collaboration were not disclosed. 


Dovetail Genomics this week launched a certified service provider program to expand access to its Hi-C technology. The Australian Genome Research Facility is the first partner in the program. 


Bionano Genomics said this week that it adjourned a special meeting of stockholders held on Oct. 2 because the required quorum for a vote was not reached. According to the company, only 22.5 percent of total shares outstanding have submitted their votes, below the 33.3 percent needed. 

The shareholder vote is needed to approve the issuance of unregistered clinical milestone-linked warrants the company placed in July, comprising Series A warrants to purchase up to 17,513,136 shares of common stock and Series B warrants to purchase up to 17,513,136 shares of common stock. The Series warrants have an exercise price of $.571 per share. The aggregate gross proceeds from the July offering were approximately $10 million, and the potential additional gross proceeds from the Series warrants, if fully exercised on a cash basis, will be approximately $20 million. The special meeting will reconvene on Oct. 30, the company said. 


Agilent Technologies said this week that it has partnered with the National University of Singapore's Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine to establish the NUS-Agilent Center of Excellence in Cell Metabolism. Over the next four years, the partners plan to collaborate on cardiovascular and metabolic disease translational research. Agilent will provide its xCelligence, Seahorse XF, and BioTek metabolic and cellular phenotyping technologies to support targeted and untargeted metabolic profiling for large-scale population-based research cohorts. The new center is part of Project RESET, a five-year initiative funded by the government of Singapore to develop early detection methods for cardiovascular disease. In addition, it will support the Cardiovascular Metabolic Disease Translational Research Program (CVMD-TRP) and the Preclinical Platform for Development of Therapeutics for Heart Failure (PREVENT-HF) at NUS Medicine. Financial details were not disclosed.


DiaCarta said this week that it has entered into a testing service contract with the US Department of Veterans Affairs San Francisco VA Health Care System. The Pleasanton, California-based molecular diagnostics company said that under the contract, terms of which were not disclosed, it will provide testing for the autoinflammatory disease VEXAS syndrome within the VA system starting Oct. 1, using the Biocarta’s QClamp Plex VEXAS test. The test was developed by leveraging the firm’s XNA technology, which amplifies the signal from a mutant target sequence without needing RNA or DNA extraction or amplification. 


The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) said this week that it is participating in an early-access program for the Illumina Protein Prep, a sequencing-based proteomics assay featuring Somamer reagents from Standard BioTools. The technology, which can analyze over 6,000 different proteins per sample, will be available as part of the service offering from TGen’s Collaborative Center for Translational Mass Spectrometry (CCTMS). 


ERS Genomics said this week that it has signed a nonexclusive CRISPR-Cas9 license agreement with Université de Montréal. Under the agreement, financial terms of which were not disclosed, the university has access to ERS's patent portfolio, enabling it to launch two CRISPR-Cas9 screening facility platforms at its Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer. ERS licenses intellectual property held by Emmanuelle Charpentier and has nearly 150 licenses in place worldwide. 


In Brief This Week is a selection of news items that may be of interest to our readers but had not previously appeared on GenomeWeb.