NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Singaporean molecular diagnostics shop Vela Diagnostics has gone into judicial management and ceased normal operations, according to a source close to the situation.
Judicial management is a legal process similar to Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Rather than going out of business and liquidating its assets, a company under judicial management continues to operate under court supervision.
Vela Dx was founded in 2011 and the following year it opened offices in New Jersey and Hamburg, Germany. The company offers tests based on PCR and next-generation sequencing technologies, and in 2012 it signed a licensing and supply agreement with Life Technologies, now part of Thermo Fisher Scientific, to provide Vela Dx the rights to develop clinical diagnostic tests based on the Ion Torrent semiconductor sequencing technology.
That same year Swift Biosciences licensed its myT Primer Technology to Vela Dx to use in real-time quantitative PCR-based in vitro diagnostics products for detecting somatic mutations in human cancer.
This past November Vela Dx completed the listing of its NGS system with the US Food and Drug Administration as a class II medical device, and in mid-January it launched its Sentosa SQ Colorectal Cancer NGS panel with CE mark.
During the past month, the company also launched the Sentosa SQ Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Panel for NGS-based gene sequence variant detection and identification as a CE-IVD test, and the Sentosa SQ Hepatitis C Virus Genotyping Next-Generation Sequencing Assay for research use only.