NEW YORK — South African bioinformatics firm Hyrax Biosciences said on Tuesday that it has signed an agreement to comarket its Exatype automated DNA analysis platform with Roche Diagnostics' research-use-only KAPA HyperCap SARS-CoV-2 panel.
Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.
According to Hyrax, Roche's KAPA HyperCap workflow allows one-day sample preparation while the SARS-CoV-2 panel provides high specificity, uniformity, and success rates from low viral load inputs. The Exatype platform automates sequence analysis and includes SARS-CoV-2 lineage/clade typing algorithms for read mapping and variant calling.
"Pairing our Exatype analysis platform with Roche's KAPA HyperCap SARS-CoV-2 panel ensures high and uniform coverage of the viral genome, which is of the utmost importance in confident identification of emerging isolates and variants," Hyrax CEO Simon Travers said in a statement. "Combining these technologies into a single workflow will lead to higher quality results and increased reliability of sequencing-based viral genotyping."