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GATC Biotech Taps Bluebee to Support Sequencing Services Business

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Bluebee and GATC Biotech have signed an agreement allowing GATC Biotech to use Bluebee's genomic analysis platform to support its DNA and RNA sequencing services.

Under the terms of the agreement, GATC Biotech's bioinformatics team will be able to access the Bluebee platform on a private cloud and will retain full control of all the pipelines and data management capabilities. This is necessary to meet the "stringent information protection standards" of both companies, according to the partners. Furthermore, all of the data will be processed and stored in Germany in order to comply with both European Union and German data privacy regulations.

Marco Pietschmann, GATC Biotech's director of information technology and quality management, said in a statement that the company selected Bluebee's platform because of its increased automation and flexibility. "The Bluebee platform will support our guaranteed turn-around times even for the most computationally demanding pipelines, irrespective of the number of samples we need to process in parallel," he said. "The flexibility of the platform permits us to obtain end-to-end integration with our in-house processes."

Financial and other terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

In March, Bluebee closed a Series A financing round in which it raised €10 million ($11.2 million) from new investors including Capricorn ICT Arkiv, Korys, and Biover II, and from existing shareholders including Buysse & Partners and the Bluebee management team. The company also raised €1.8 million from Buysse & Partners and Delft University of Technology in 2015.