Cartagenia said this week that it has signed contracts with two Canadian customers — Credit Valley Hospital and an unnamed private genetics laboratory — for the use of its Bench Lab CNV software, which is used for analyzing structural variants in array CGH data.
Credit Valley Hospital lab is one of two Ontario-based clinical cytogenetic laboratories that are designated to run postnatal diagnostic arrays. Cartagenia said that the lab is using Bench Lab CNV to build an internal database of genotype and clinical phenotype findings that will allow it to classify relevant findings and automate clinical reporting.
The company has also signed an agreement with a private genetics lab that provides services to diagnostic referrers of prenatal and perinatal assays.
This client will use Bench Lab CNV to interpret array CGH assay results in the context of patient phenotype, detect and flag known syndromes, and generate clinical reports.
These two customers are Cartagenia's first in Canada, which CEO Herman Verrelst described as an "important market" for the company.
Earlier this year, the company opened a new US office to support existing customers — which include Gaithersburg, Md.-based Gene DX and the Los Angeles Children’s Hospital — and more generally to expand its North American footprint (BI 3/23/2012).
Besides its CNV analysis software, the company has also launched Bench Lab NGS, a version of its Bench Lab software that's geared towards analyzing next-generation sequence data in clinical laboratories (BI 3/30/2012).