Caliper Life Sciences last week announced two separate deals, one with Yale University's Center for Genome Analysis and another with Erasmus University Medical Center, to automate sample prep for next-generation sequencing projects.
The company disclosed the agreements prior to PerkinElmer's announcement that it plans to acquire Caliper in a deal worth approximately $600 million (see related story, this issue).
In the deal with Yale, the university has purchased a Sciclone NGS Workstation and LabChip GXI, which it will use in conjunction with the Illumina HiSeq 2000 to implement automated protocols for exome capture and library preparation. Caliper will work with the Yale researchers to develop the protocols. Additionally, Shrikant Mane, Yale's director of the Center for Genome Analysis, said in a statement that the university would eventually look to automate sequencing workflows on the Pacific Biosciences machine using Caliper's systems.
Under a separate deal, Caliper is working with Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on a 3,000-sample exome sequencing study to uncover the genetic risk factors for age-related disorders such as osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer disease, and type 2 diabetes. The study is part of a large epidemiological study that includes 15,000 participants.
The Erasmus MC researchers are using Caliper's Sciclone and Roche's NimbleGen SeqCap EZ Exome to automate exome capture and sequencing. They expect to complete the exome sequencing of 3,000 participants in three to four months, due to the automation.