NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Pacific Biosciences and GenDx today announced they will co-market products aimed at full-length HLA gene sequencing.
GenDx, a Dutch molecular diagnostics firm, currently offers reagents for amplifying full-length, Class I HLA genes. As part of today's agreement, it will offer a version of its NGSgo reagent line with barcoded primers developed with PacBio for use on PacBio's RS II next-generation sequencing platform. The GenDx NGSengine software package for analysis of data generated on the PacBio system provides a "highly accurate," allele-level HLA typing solution, the firms said, and researchers will be able to use the new reagent kit to pool full-length, Class I HLA genes from multiple samples into one sequencing run.
"We are eager to expand our growing capabilities in this field through this partnership with GenDx, which will open the doors for high-quality HLA typing to all interested researchers, not just those who have developed their own custom primer sets," Kevin Corcoran, senior vice president of market development for PacBio, said in a statement.
Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.