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Life Technologies Licenses Stem Cell Assay Tech from Harvard

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Life Technologies today announced that it has signed a research agreement and licensing deal with Harvard University focused on stem cell assays.

The firm said that it has acquired exclusive rights from Harvard to develop a panel of characterization assays designed to rapidly evaluate human pluripotent stem cells for their use in a variety of discovery and translational research applications. The panel is expected to be offered on Life Tech's Ion Torrent semiconductor sequencing platforms, as well as its PCR-based systems.

The panel was developed by Alex Meissner, an associate professor in the department of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard, and it is being further studied and validated in collaboration with Life Tech, the firm said.

"Stem cell research and genomics have rapidly advanced in parallel over the past few years," Meissner said in a statement. "Combining both fields of study is enabling more effective and standardized ways of characterizing pluripotent cells and, therefore, greatly improving efficiency and the application of iPS cells."

The agreement with Harvard follows two other licensing deal in the stem cell field within the past year.

It licensed worldwide, non-exclusive rights to iPS Academia Japan's induced pluripotent stem cell patent portfolio in June. Around the same time, it announced a commercialization deal covering three stem cell technologies from Cellular Dynamics International for the consistent development and growth of human iPS cells for research and bioproduction.

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