EnviroLogix and Douglas Scientific said today that they have signed a multi-year exclusive distribution agreement pairing EnviroLogix's patent-pending DNAble technology with Douglas Scientific's Array Tape platform.
The distribution agreement follows on the heels of a product-development pact inked by the companies in July.
DNAble is a very rapid, highly specific isothermal nucleic acid amplification technology that can amplify both RNA and DNA targets with single-base resolution a billion-fold in 5 to 10 minutes at a single, constant temperature. It offers highly specific, rapid, multiplexed, quantitative results rivaling qPCR, but unlike that technology can amplify a target sequence from a crude sample preparation and with minimal equipment, the companies said.
Meantime, Array Tape is a flexible microplate replacement in a continuous polymer strip, serially embossed with reaction wells in customized volumes and formats. It enables a reel-to-reel process flow that utilizes inline, modular instrumentation including the Nexar liquid handling and assay processing, Soellex thermal cycling, and Araya fluorescent detection. Douglas Scientific said that Array Tape can save labs approximately 30 percent to 60 percent on consumable costs and 80 percent to 90 percent on reagents due to miniaturized reaction volumes.
"Adding the DNAble chemistry to our product line brings us one step closer to providing our clients with a complete solution," Dan Malmstrom, President and COO of Douglas Scientific, said in a statement. "Fully automated qualitative and quantitative nucleic acid testing can now be done at unprecedented rates while providing dramatic savings to our clients."
Douglas Scientific also has a collaboration and co-marketing agreement with Life Technologies to pair Life Tech's TaqMan real-time PCR-based genotyping assays with Array Tape for high-throughput genotyping applications.