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Element Biosciences Inks Two More Partnerships to Plug Sequencer Into Existing NGS Workflows

NEW YORK - Element Biosciences said on Thursday that it is teaming up with Dovetail Genomics and Jumpcode Genomics to integrate its impending Aviti sequencing platform with those firms' existing NGS products.

Financial and other terms of the deals were not disclosed.

In its alliance with Dovetail, San Diego-based Element will validate Dovetail's proximity ligation-based next-generation sequencing library prep solutions for epigenetics on the Aviti platform.

"The long-range, unbiased nature of the Dovetail data opens up many new applications not typically accessible with a short-read platform, offering a richer view of the genome from every sequencing run," said Dovetail CEO Todd Dickinson in a statement.

Under the collaboration and comarketing agreement with Jumpcode, Element developers will validate Jumpcode's CRISPRclean technology, which harnesses the specificity of CRISPR-Cas9 to degrade abundant and uninformative sequences in NGS libraries, on Aviti.

Element said the combination between CRISPRclean and Aviti will enable users to focus on lower-expressing transcripts in single-cell samples, effectively shifting sequencing power to gain deeper coverage and improved signal. The firm said the Aviti system detected 50 percent more genes per cell and classified additional cell types in human blood samples treated with CRISPRclean. Additionally, for infectious agent surveillance studies, CRISPRclean and Aviti offered benefits in sensitivity, cost, and throughput. After treating SARS-CoV-2-infected human samples with CRISPRclean to remove uninformative sequences, Aviti detected variants and host response at a lower cost than other benchtop sequencers, according to the firm.

Element plans to launch its sequencing platform on March 14 and has been busy striking collaboration deals to make it compatible with existing NGS products. Earlier this week, the firm announced partnerships with Roche, Agilent Technologies, New England Biolabs, Qiagen, and Watchmaker Genomics.

In early February, Element also acquired Loop Genomics, which sells sample prep kits and sequencing services that provide synthetic long reads using short-read sequencing.