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Population Genetics, Agilent Reach Licensing Agreement for VeriTag

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Population Genetics Technologies today said that it has exclusively licensed patent rights covering its VeriTag technology to Agilent Technologies.

The deal covers US Patent No. 8,481,292, entitled "Increasing confidence of allele calls with molecular counting." Veritag quantifies genomic variants down to .1 percent, Population Genetics said on its website, adding it "relies on the ligation of random DNA tags to genomes" prior to PCR amplification "thus uniquely labeling each molecule."

The Cambridge, UK-based firm retains exclusive rights to develop and commercialize the VeriTag technology for applications in human infectious disease diagnostics, as well as non-exclusive rights for veterinary diagnostics and plant genomic uses, it said.

Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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