NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Bio-Rad Laboratories and Illumina announced today an exclusive partnership to develop a comprehensive single-cell analysis workflow. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the companies anticipate a late 2016 or early 2017 launch.
The end-to-end commercial solution will enable high-throughput sequencing of thousands of individual cells, the companies said in a statement. The firms will combine Bio-Rad's droplet partitioning technology with Illumina's next-generation sequencing to isolate and barcode single cells, analyzing resulting data with Illumina's BaseSpace cloud infrastructure.
The scalable solution will isolate a larger number of single cells than current commercially available solutions in a few minutes and at a cost-effective price, according to the statement.
"We welcome the opportunity to collaborate with Illumina, the global leader in NGS technologies, to develop this long-awaited platform for single-cell genomics," Bio-Rad's Executive Vice President and General Manager of its Digital Biology Center, Annette Tumolo, said in a statement.
The collaboration enables both companies to serve "the significant market for single-cell NGS, enabling scientists to make groundbreaking advances in gene expression and beyond," noted Illumina Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Christian Henry. "Bio-Rad is recognized for delivering trusted, high-quality products in a market with increasingly stringent regulations and standards," he added.