NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Integrated DNA Technologies said today that it has opened a new R&D facility in Redwood City, Calif., in order to ramp up its application-specific product development efforts.
The new 8,000-square-foot building will "maximize the company's world class custom oligonucleotide manufacturing capability" for molecular biology applications such as qPCR, next-generation sequencing, and synthetic biology, IDT said in a statement.
"For years we've focused on enabling research," IDT Chief Commercial Officer Stephen Gunstream said in a statement. "Redwood City takes that mission to the next level. Now, in addition to our traditional offerings, we will be able to develop complete workflow solutions for cutting-edge applications."
Elaborating on this, Gunstream told GenomeWeb that over the last several years IDT has invested in R&D to develop "innovative products to enable customers more than just [through] the manufacturing of oligos to customers' specifications."
As an example, Gunstream pointed to the company's launch of a new exome enrichment panel for next-generation sequencing at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology annual meeting in February.
"IDT is emerging in these fields [of] next-gen sequencing, synthetic biology, gene expression, [and] genotyping," Gunstream said. The new R&D facility, he added, "is really sort of the last stone to put in place in terms of our investment there."
To help with these efforts, IDT also said that Caifu Chen has joined the company as senior vice president for research and development. Chen has 25 years of genomics research experience in the academic and biotech sectors, particularly in the area of qPCR and NGS for research and diagnostics.
"We built this new facility for two reasons: One, to have a presence in the Bay Area, which is the worldwide center of the biotech industry. Second, we want to attract top talent that will develop innovative, robust solutions for NGS and qPCR," Chen said in a statement.
Gunstream further noted that IDT plans to continue building out its NGS enrichment product line, eventually providing customers with "a full solution from the front end of library prep through sequencing." He added that IDT is also currently building a new set of genomic assays, but declined to provide additional details.
IDT's corporate headquarters are in Coralville, Iowa. The company also has operations in San Diego; Leuven, Belgium; and Singapore; among other locations.
This story has been updated from a previous version to include comments from IDT.