NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – CLC Bio today said that it, along with partners Ion Torrent Systems and Aarhus University Hospital, have received a $2 million grant from the Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation to support a molecular diagnostics collaboration.
Under the three-year alliance, the partners aim to develop and integrated hardware and software solution for molecular diagnostics that will utilize high-throughput sequencing. According to CLC Bio, the partners aim to provide faster and more precise DNA-based diagnostics.
Earlier this year, Ion Torrent unveiled its Personal Genome Machine, an electronic sequencer last week that reads DNA on a semiconductor chip by measuring the release of hydrogen ions as nucleotides get incorporated by DNA polymerase. The PGM sequencer is a desktop instrument that will cost only $50,000.
"Our Ion PGM sequencer does a single run in about an hour or two, which makes our simple, yet scalable technology ideal to be part of this molecular diagnostics project, where time is a critical factor in the patient diagnosis phase," Alan Williams, VP of software and informatics at Guilford, Conn.-based Ion Torrent, said in a statement.
CLC Bio said that the collaboration will lead to an IT solution that can be used for molecular diagnostics research and for clinical diagnostics applications.