Life Technologies announces the Ion AmpliSeq Exome Certified Service Provider program

Life Technologies Corporation (NASDAQ: LIFE) today announces the Ion AmpliSeq™ Exome Certified Service Provider program, a global organization of some of the world's top service providers that will sequence and analyze human exomes in as little as two days. Sequencing requires just 50 ng of DNA and is very competitively priced, making exome sequencing accessible to any researcher.

Until now, exome sequencing through a service provider has cost $1,000 or more, taken six to eight weeks and required as much as three micrograms of DNA. Using the Ion AmpliSeq™ Exome Kit, the Ion Proton™ Sequencer, and the Ion Reporter™ Software, service providers can sequence two exomes in a single run -- from DNA to results in just two days. This eliminates the need to batch samples just to make the price of exome sequencing affordable.

In addition to being faster and more affordable, the Ion AmpliSeq™ Exome Kit delivers the most uniform sequencing coverage in the industry*, with up to 98 percent of bases covered at 10x, and up to 95 percent of bases covered at 20x, for a single exome. 

The Ion AmpliSeq™ Exome Certified Service Provider program includes the institutions below initially, with additional global members to be announced shortly:

• The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada
• Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY
• Claritas Genomics, Boston, MA
• Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, NY
• GeneDx, Rockville, MD
• Cedars Sinai Genomics Core, Los Angeles, CA
• Selah Genomics, Greenville, SC

"The Ion AmpliSeq™ Exome Kit dramatically reduces the time and the cost required to sequence a human exome," said Dr. Stephen Scherer, Senior Scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children and Director of The Centre for Applied Genomics.  "With the Ion Proton™ Sequencer, we can capture and sequence the exome in just two days, so there's no need to batch projects together in a run to keep costs down. This is important to customers dealing with clinical research samples who often need their sequence data as quickly as possible."

"As a key partner with Life Technologies, the Ion AmpliSeq™ Exome Kit provides us with a workflow that is amenable to large scale variant detection for both the research and ultimately clinical research laboratories.  Sequence data comparisons using a variety of enrichment and sequencing technologies confirm our commitment to delivering cost effective data for our customers using the Ion AmpliSeq™ Exome product," said Dr. Patrice Milos, CEO and President, Claritas Genomics.

"Exome sequencing will be central to discoveries made in clinical research," said Dr. Candace Johnson, Deputy Director and the Wallace Chair of Translational Research at Roswell Park Cancer Institute. "The Ion AmpliSeq™ Exome Certified Service Provider program enables researchers to get access to high-quality exome sequencing data from small amounts of input material (as low as 50 ng) and with very fast turnaround. Generating vast amounts of genomic data helps us and others understand the mechanisms of how cancer develops and spreads."

The service provider program also provides fast and comprehensive analysis with the Ion Reporter™ Software, which provides a list of mutations, including copy number variation, and associated annotations drawn from dozens of public databases within hours after a sequencing run. It also enables service labs to access their data through the web and rich filtering tools that help them focus on the most impactful variants.

"Ion AmpliSeq™ Exome Certified Service Provider program makes fast, affordable and high-quality exome sequencing available to any researcher," said Ion Torrent's Vice President Maneesh Jain. "The low amount of required input DNA and the turnkey analysis-to-annotated-results solution provided by Ion Reporter™ Software make this an ideal solution for clinical researchers."

Source: http://www.lifetechnologies.com