NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) — RainDance Technologies said today that the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology is now a RainDance Center of Excellence.
As a RainDance CoE, Huntsville, Ala.-based HudsonAlpha will serve as a reference site and service provider for RainDance products. The institute features a Genomic Services Lab that assists academic and commercial customers worldwide to better understand the genetic causes of cancer, bipolar disorders, and other common, complex diseases.
RainDance's product portfolio will enable the Genomics Services Lab to offer a variety of next-generation sequencing and digital PCR services to study cell-based and cell-free biomarkers for disease risk disposition, initial detection, pathology, and residual disease, RainDance said. These products include the ThunderStorm NGS content enrichment platform, RainDrop digital PCR system, and ThunderBolts NGS cancer panel.
"We are committed to providing our academic and commercial customers with innovative genomic research tools that are designed to reduce hands-on time, minimize variation in handling, increase throughput, and reduce costs," Shawn Levy, director of the Genomic Services Lab at HudsonAlpha, said in a statement. "The combination of the ThunderBolts cancer panel and the ThunderStorm system enables us to achieve greater sensitivity and depth of sequence coverage from a wide range of samples and ultimately ensure higher quality NGS data at a lower overall cost per sample, all on a proven unified technology platform."