A California bill would essentially codify new laws and a new term — "post-CLIA bioinformatics services" — by which to regulate the consumer genomics industry. However, experts have found the description confusing and the scope of the bill potentially problematic for players in the bioinformatics field.

The US Senate Finance Committee chairman's proposed $750 million tax on clinical labs has been dropped. But as the healthcare reform debate rages, industry stakeholders are highlighting less draconian ways for the clinical lab sector to reduce healthcare costs, such as personalized medicine and prevention strategies.

Since the FDA has indicated that most IVDMIAs will have to undergo either 510(k) or premarket approval, the IoM's recommendations will certainly have implications for this subset of devices.

OSU Medical Center will enroll patients who agree to join Coriell's personalized medicine project under the guidance of their primary care physician. The partners will study the impact of using genomic information in treating chronic conditions.

The $399 PsoriasisDx Genetic Test is a sequencing-based assay that detects the presence of MICA-A9, an immune-response gene variant present in approximately 60 percent of patients with psoriatic arthritis.

Harry Stylli, Elizabeth Dragon, Paul Hawran, Steve Owings, Harry Hixson, Ronald Lindsay, Justin File

The $2.4 million grant will fund an international effort to study drought-related gene interaction networks.

The firm's device utilizes SNP chips to verify identity and kinship.

The MD Anderson spinout is developing its biomarker technologies for use in diagnostics and drug studies.

A day after the firm's CEO and senior VP of R&D were fired and other executives resigned, Sequenom's shares took a beating. A lack of clarity from Sequenom's conference call also had analysts concerned.

The two patents deal with DNA vectors that can be used in gene mapping and site-directed gene insertion, and are related to a different pair of patents already under reexamination at the USPTO.

By comparing the genomes of more than two dozen bacterial strains, a Japanese research team has identified genomic features that appear to contribute to the development of enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli.

The agreement covers systems for HIV and hepatitis B management.

The university will support Burzynski's data management and storage needs for glioma treatment studies.

The firm will use the funding to develop its proteomics software platform.

Depending on the outcome of additional experiments, the company hopes direct RNA sequencing could become available to early-access customers sometime next year, a Helicos official said.

For Complete Genomics, which provided the sequencing data for ISB's study, the project provides the first independent validation of its sequencing service by an early-access customer.

At the UBS Global Life Sciences Conference in New York last week, Illumina President and CEO Jay Flatley also said that the firm is "pleased with" the progress of Oxford Nanopore Technologies, in which it invested $18 million earlier this year.

Over the next few months, the Roche company plans to start rolling out a variety of improvements for the Genome Sequencer FLX, including longer reads, a new library protocol, amplicon sequencing for the Titanium platform, and new assembly software.

The products, which are expected to debut early next month, include a 2.1-million feature array and a chip with three 720,000-feature arrays containing CNVs that could be implicated in autism, schizophrenia, autoimmune diseases, and HIV susceptibility.

As part of the deal, Heidelberg, Germany-based Febit will install several of Life Tech's SOLiDs and real-time PCR systems in its genomic-services facility, and aims to process around 1,000 samples per week by the first half of next year.

Agendia said the proceeds will serve to "ramp up the US commercial organization, double the sales force, and reinforce marketing, reimbursement, regulatory, and operational support" for its MammaPrint array-based breast cancer recurrence test.

The change in its sales strategy comes as Osmetech sees an uptick in placements of its eSensor XT-8 platform, which rose from 18 to 43 during the first six months of the year. Revenues for the period increased 131 percent year over year.

Life Technologies and several co-plaintiffs claim that Illumina's DNA sequencing products and services, including the Genome Analyzer, infringe three of their DNA amplification patents.

The deal is part of a strategic co-marketing agreement between Febit and Life Technologies, under which Febit has become a member of Life Tech's service provider programs for SOLiD and TaqMan.