Agilent and Oxford Gene Technology expand partnership

Agilent Technologies and Oxford Gene Technology have announced that they have expanded an already existing partnership into an exclusive agreement for Agilent to provide OGT with oligonucleotide microarrays.

Chief executive of OGT, Mike Evans, said: “We are delighted to broaden our supply partnership with Agilent to include the industry-leading SureSelect platform for our recently launched Genefficiency next-generation sequencing service. We are also pleased to extend our OEM supply agreement for oligonucleotide microarrays, building on the success of our comprehensive CytoSure product range for cytogenetics.”

Robert Shueren, vice president and general manager of Agilent’s genomics business, said: “Agilent and OGT have a very close working relationship and we are excited to expand our collaboration to the SureSelect platform under our Certified Services Provider program. OGT’s bioinformatics capabilities add significant value to customers targeting specific areas of the genome with our SureSelect product line.”

The Agilent SureSelect Target Enrichment System is an in-solution hybridization capture technology which streamlines next-generation sequencing by enabling researchers to sequence only genomic regions of interest. It has enabled researchers to identify mutations associated with 50 Mendelian diseases, 10 different types of cancer and other ailments such as schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease.

The SureSelect platform offers the most comprehensive offering of catalogue and custom capture kits, including the SureSelect Target Enrichment kit, gDNA prep kit and library prep kit, on all major sequencing platforms.

The SureSelect platform has led to 125 peer-reviewed discovery publications, the greatest number to date.

For more information, visit www.agilent.comThis story originally appeared in The Column. Click here to view that issue.