Deloitte, PerkinElmer, iRODS, And More: News From June 2018
June 27, 2018 | June featured exciting new, products, and partnerships from around the bio-IT community from innovating companies, organizations, and universities, including Deloitte, PerkinElmer, iRODS, and more.
Deloitte , a 2018 Bio-IT World Best Practices Award-winner, has integrated its ConvergeHEALTH Patient Connect product with Apple HealthKit, CareKit, and ResearchKit frameworks, enabling patients to improve adherence to treatment plans while supporting connectivity to clinical research. This is the latest in a series of innovative additions to the ConvergeHEALTH product portfolio. ConvergeHEALTH is a group of products engineered and built by Deloitte to enable life sciences clients to respond to the shift to value-based, personalized medicine. In addition, Deloitte is expanding its Apple practice, a dedicated team of health care app developers in the Deloitte Digital studios. "This dedicated team of UI, UX and iOS engineers will specialize in developing health care-specific digital apps to transform the patient experience," Mike Brinker, global Deloitte Digital leader and principal at Deloitte Consulting, said in a press release. Press Release
PerkinElmer announced its NEXTflex unique dual index barcodes, the latest addition to the NEXTflex family of library prep solutions. The NEXTflex unique dual index barcodes are 192 barcoded adapters that provide unmatched data security in sequencing applications for use on Illumina platforms. This advanced system is designed to specifically mitigate index hopping and spread of signal, a known phenomenon associated with multiplexing that impacts next-gen sequencing technologies. Instruments utilizing a patterned flow cell and exclusion amplification technology experience increased levels of sample mis-assignment as a result. These adapters address the important issue of sample misidentification, thereby enabling assurance of data integrity. By allowing researchers to pool multiple libraries in a single flow cell lane, multiplexing with the NEXTflex barcoded adapters also significantly increases processing capacity, while reducing costs. Press Release
BioDiscovery announced the launch of their Nexus Copy Number 10.0 software, which provides an extensive list of statistical and visualization tools to perform large cohort studies: comparisons to identify statistically significant differences between subgroups, identification of cooperating events, clustering, gene enrichment, and more. With integration of sequence variant analysis along with copy number and AOH, Nexus Copy Number is a one-stop solution for data from a wide range of NGS and array technologies. Other features in version 10.0 include export of the distance matrix for clustering, user-specified event colors, and plotting of BAF (B-allele frequency) for the BAM ngCGH (matched) algorithm. BioDiscovery’s platform-independent software packages provide a complete spectrum of data analysis solutions for gene expression (RNASeq, mRNA, miRNA) and copy number and sequence variation from microarray and NGS (WES, WGS, targeted panels) technologies. Nexus Copy Number is a user-friendly and robust software solution with specialized cancer specific tools and algorithms and the capability to handle large volumes of data. With its ability to handle virtually any genome and integrate data from different modalities (gene expression, copy number, sequence variation), it offers a more complete picture of the genomic landscape. Press Release
Mercator MedSystems announced it has received $11 million in Series D equity financing led by Shenzhen Salubris Pharmaceuticals (Salubris), with participation from current Mercator investors and other undisclosed new investors. The new funding will further advance the clinical development of Mercator’s proprietary micro-infusion catheter systems and accelerate the company’s vision of improving outcomes in patients around the world with cardiovascular and pulmonary disease. “We are excited to announce that such a prominent Chinese pharmaceutical company is partnering with Mercator for the Bullfrog Micro-Infusion Device’s entry into the fastest growing medical market in the world,” said Trent Reutiman, chief executive officer of Mercator, in a press release. “Salubris has recently been investing in a robust and cutting-edge cardiovascular medical device portfolio in China. Their lead in the current round of financing is a strong vote of confidence in the potential of the Bullfrog Device to treat patients with peripheral arterial disease (PAD) and critical limb ischemia.” Pursuant to the terms of the investment, Salubris secured the exclusive rights to clinically and commercially develop and manufacture the Bullfrog Device in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Salubris will seek to replicate Mercator’s demonstrated success in PAD studies in the PRC and will explore novel applications of drug and biologic delivery in cardiac disease enabled by the precise tissue targeting with the Bullfrog Device. Mercator is eligible to receive developmental and sales-based milestone payments, and tiered royalties on sales. Press Release
Emulate announced that it has secured a $36 million Series C financing round led by Founders Fund. The funding also includes additional new investors including ALS Investment Fund, SciFi VC, members of GlassWall Syndicate Association, as well as several existing investors. Funds from this financing round will directly impact the company’s expansion of its suite of products within its Human Emulation System, broadening functionality and enhancing commercial efforts, so that researchers in the pharmaceutical industry can use Organs-on-Chips technology across the entire drug discovery and development process. “The dependence of drug development on animal models for safety and efficacy testing has hit a wall,” said Aaron VanDevender, Chief Scientist and Principal at Founders Fund, in a press release. “As therapeutic approaches become ever more precise and complex, the limitations of legacy animal models increasingly prevent accurate predictions of drug responses in humans. This crisis has simultaneously put patients at risk of unpredictable side effects while inhibiting the approval of novel life-saving therapies. Emulate’s platform uses human cells to recapitulate human physiology, enabling the development of safer, more efficacious drugs. We believe its adoption by drug developers is a scientific, commercial, and moral imperative.” Proceeds of the financing will be used to expand the functionality of Emulate’s automated, lab-ready Human Emulation System — which is comprised of Organ-Chips, instrumentation, and software applications. The company will add advanced biological capabilities to its Organ-Chip products, including the Liver-Chip, Intestine-Chip, Lung-Chip, Brain-Chip, and human-relevant models of thrombosis and immune system modulation. The expanded Organ-Chip product suite will also include a range of disease models that will be designed to enable drug efficacy testing and elucidate new insights into disease mechanisms. In addition, the Human Emulation System will be enhanced with new software applications that enable data analysis, integrate with standard analytical approaches, and foster collaboration between and among teams that use Emulate’s platform. Press Release
Hitachi Chemical Advanced Therapeutics Solutions, a US subsidiary of Hitachi Chemical that engages in contract manufacturing and development of regenerative medicine products, and Invetech announced a collaboration agreement to commercialize an automated platform for cell therapy manufacturing, the Counter-Flow Centrifugation system (CFC). The collaboration will significantly enhance the development and manufacturing capability available to the cell therapy market, helping to deliver commercially viable therapies to patients in need, more quickly, at reduced cost and with greater product confidence. The CFC is a flexible, fully-automated platform designed as a key technology in clinical and commercial manufacture of cell therapies under Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) regulations. The CFC is designed to accommodate research, pre-clinical, clinical and commercial manufacturing of cell-based therapies using closed single-use disposables. It provides a robust solution for small-scale processing suitable for GMP manufacturing of autologous and other patient-specific products, while also supporting efficient development of small and large-scale processes at lower cost. The CFC automates common cell processing functions such as labeling, selection, transduction, washing, and concentration, with minimal operator intervention and enables programmable integration of multiple processing steps – an example application is the production of Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapies. HCATS and Invetech were integral to the conception, development and functionality of the CFC, which was awarded a 2017 Good Design Award. Press Release
Peerwith is opening the next phase of its equity crowdfunding campaign to extend the offering to the public. Peerwith has recently closed the initial, private phase of its crowdfunding campaign, which was primarily aimed at experts active on the platform. A substantial part of the target amount was raised from this group. Now, the Company would like to welcome other interested investors to become Peerwith shareholders, to help raise an additional EUR 200,000 in equity crowdfunding. Ivo Verbeek, Co-founder and Director, Peerwith, commented in a written statement: “Funds raised in the campaign will be used, among other things, to roll-out the recently announced PeerScienceCoin, a new blockchain-based payment token for scientists and academic institutions collaborating on peerwith.com. The team at Peerwith are excited for the company to enter this next phase of growth, and look forward to welcoming more members to the Peerwith community.” Press Release
Pacific Biosciences announced that obtaining microbial genomes with high accuracy and contiguity has become faster and more affordable thanks to new multiplexing tools it will feature at the upcoming American Society for Microbiology (ASM) annual meeting in Atlanta. The increased throughput of the PacBio Sequel System enables multiple microbes to be sequenced on a single SMRT Cell in a single day, greatly increasing throughput and reducing costs per genome assembly. This multiplexing can be readily achieved by incorporating a unique barcode for each microbe into the SMRTbell adapters after shearing genomic DNA using a streamlined library construction process. Incorporating a barcode without the requirement for PCR amplification preserves important epigenetic information. “A comprehensive view of the bacterial genome, including genes, regulatory regions, IS elements, phage integration sites, and base modifications is vital to understanding key traits such as antibiotic resistance, virulence, and metabolism. Single Molecule, Real-Time Sequencing technology provides complete genomes, often assembled into a single contig,” Jonas Korlach, Chief Scientific Officer of Pacific Biosciences, in a press release. “We are looking forward to updating the community on our recently launched microbial multiplexing workflow, which incorporates two new validated barcoded adapter kits and leverages other advancements with Sequel Binding/Sequencing Kit 2.1 and SMRT Link v5.1.0.” Press Release
Quantum announced the company has joined the iRODS Consortium, the foundation that leads development and support of the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS). Testing for StorNext-powered Xcellis Scale-out NAS with iRODS is complete, and users may now deploy the combined solution where local workflows require high-performance data access, cost-effective mass storage and ease of integration. Powered by StorNext software, Xcellis Scale-out NAS is ideal for environments requiring easily-integrated high-performance storage combined more economical media such as tape, object storage or public cloud. iRODS is a complement to Xcellis, adding rich metadata and discovery, secure sharing and collaboration, and extensive workflow automation capabilities for research and corporate organizations worldwide. Press Release
Nexsan announced the release of Assureon Cloud Transfer, an additional feature of its Assureon secure archive storage system. This add-on enables customers to freely migrate or copy data to or from public cloud platforms and Assureon’s on-premise archive storage providing long-term data protection and retention. Assureon Cloud Transfer is designed to combat the rising costs of cloud storage and offers a comprehensive security and integrity feature set. The cloud offers flexibility and elasticity, but by unnecessarily keeping cold data in the cloud for long periods of time, organizations are struggling with painfully high invoices from their cloud vendor. With Assureon Cloud Transfer, customers can utilize the best features of the cloud, while offloading cold data onto a secure Assureon on-premise hardware platform. This reduces the accumulating premium costs associated with keeping data in the public cloud, providing data portability while reducing risk of cloud vendor lock in. Assureon Cloud Transfer optimizes demands on data backup infrastructure. In addition, organizations can set policies to automate the process, allowing cold data to move freely and automatically from and to the cloud to Assureon, yet retaining immediate access to all files from any desired cloud server instance. Nexsan’s proven Assureon on-premise archive hardware provides assured data protection and integrity for long term storage of important digital assets. Used by thousands of organizations to protect their most sensitive or valuable digital files, Assureon implements a unique file fingerprinting and asset serialization process combined with metadata authenticated by a private blockchain. This enables automated integrity audits, providing positive assurance of the completeness and authenticity of business records. Assureon also provides a powerful suite of defenses against the growing menace of ransomware and other threats which mimic the permissions of genuine users to cause damage and may be easily configured to support any popular regulatory or compliance regimen including HIPAA, SEC17a-4, and GDPR. Press Release
Certara announced the launch of Phoenix 8.1. Phoenix is a widely-used validated software for pharmacokinetic (PK), pharmacodynamic (PD), and toxicokinetic (TK) modeling and simulation worldwide. 90% of novel drugs approved by the US FDA are from companies that leverage Phoenix in their R&D programs. “Certara’s mission is to improve decision-making throughout the drug development continuum; we are involved at every step from selecting the best drug candidate to demonstrating its value to payers and health authorities. To that end, we are committed to providing a full range of modeling and simulation technology, advisory services, compliance support, and training programs to ensure that scientists optimize their work. We are proud to launch Phoenix 8.1, which offers significant statistical, graphical and validation enhancements to automate processes, saving both time and resources,” said Thomas Kerbusch, President of Certara Strategic Consulting, in a press release. Press Release
Strata Oncology announced the close of a $26 million USD Series B funding round. New investors Pfizer Ventures, Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, Deerfield Management and Renaissance Venture Capital Fund were joined by existing investors Arboretum Ventures and Baird Capital. Strata Oncology will use the new funding to: expand the Strata Precision Oncology Network, a group of leading health systems adopting Strata's platform to systematize tumor molecular profiling and precision therapy trials; further develop the company's clinical-genomic data and software solutions to streamline health system precision oncology workflows and catalyze new clinical research opportunities; submit the company's tumor molecular profiling assay, StrataNGS, for approval by the US Food and Drug Administration. StrataNGS includes actionable DNA and RNA biomarkers and will be expanded to include tumor mutational load; and launch the Pan-cancer molecular Analysis for cancer THerapy (PATH) study, a Strata-sponsored master therapeutic protocol, to support rapid and cost-effective indication expansion studies for on-market pharma drugs. Press Release
Nimbix announced the Technology Preview of JARVICE 3.0, a robust HPC hybrid cloud software platform fully integrated with Kubernetes. The new container platform is designed to provide the enterprise with access to the entire Nimbix self-service catalog of HPC, AI and machine/deep learning applications. Packaged as a new enterprise software tool, JARVICE 3.0 optimally runs supercomputing and HPC workloads on-premises or remotely on the public cloud. JARVICE 3.0 is designed to provide users with instant access to HPC workflows as well as open-sourced applications in a click-to-run catalog. Upon installation of JARVICE 3.0, customers will have access to the entire Nimbix suite of containerized HPC applications as well as the ability to install their own platform apps in a modern continuous integration and deployment methodology. This new solution runs on heterogeneous machines, operating on any CPU, GPU, FPGA, any fabric (ethernet or InfiniBand), bare-metal or virtualized systems and clusters. Users may also deploy JARVICE 3.0 on their private infrastructure or in the public cloud. JARVICE 3.0 is innovating the hybrid cloud space by establishing a true infrastructure agnostic platform for HPC anywhere. Press Release
Synthego launched its Engineered Cells Portfolio with immediate access to Knockout Clone and Pool, and Advanced Cells. The Knockout Clone and Pool products enable single-click online ordering of any human cell line with a guaranteed CRISPR knockout. This guarantee combined with simplified access to CRISPR modified cells eliminates the hurdle of learning new methods and optimizing protocols, allowing scientists to focus on quality results. Advanced Cells allow researchers to leverage Synthego's CRISPR expertise to design and execute complex cell modification projects. "Gene editing technologies like CRISPR have dramatically improved how researchers make genomic modifications. As with many new biological tools, not everyone has the access, time and ability to learn and use CRISPR efficiently to get the results they want. Due to these barriers, there is significant demand for products that make CRISPR accessible to the masses so researchers can focus on experimental outcomes rather than method development," said George Church, professor at Harvard & MIT, in a press release. "Synthego is poised to meet that demand through the technology they have developed to automate CRISPR gene editing technology for engineering cells." Press Release
Equus Compute Solutions announced the release of its WHITEBOX OPEN family of servers and storage solutions that are custom, cost-optimized open-hardware platforms. With WHITEBOX OPEN, Equus enables its customers to choose the server and storage configurations that exactly meet their needs, while reducing costs and using flexible open systems management. The WHITEBOX OPEN platforms are ideal for content delivery network service providers (CDNs), cloud services providers (CSPs), value added resellers (VARs), and large IT enterprises. The unique WHITEBOX OPEN (WBO) features that enable the open-hardware capabilities of these servers include: all WBO servers use OpenBMC, which is the open-source implementation of the Baseboard Management Controller firmware stack that works across heterogeneous systems and can free companies from proprietary system management vendor lock-in; WBO servers support the use of coreboot and LinuxBoot to customize the server BIOS to create unique features, to improve security, and provide a lightning fast boot experience; OCP-inspired hardware features are incorporated in WBO servers, including OCP slots that accommodate multi-vendor network cards including 1, 10, 40, 50, 100 Gbps Ethernet NICs. The internal OCP storage slots also support NVMe and SSDs for customer applications that demand higher storage performance; and utilizing OCP networking enables WBO servers to utilize NC-SI (network controller sideband interface) in-band network management communication, removing the need for a separate 1GbE management port and the associated dedicated network that in turn generates cost savings, frees rack space, and reduces rack cabling complexity. The initial nine WHITEBOX OPEN platforms that use dual Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs range from the R1560 1U 4 bay server to the M2660 2U 4 Node server to the D2760 2U 24 bay with an optional 4 rear 2.5” hot-swap bays and 4 2.5” internal bays. Each of the WBO server platforms can be customized to exact end-user specifications. GPU-based versions of WBO servers will be available soon. Press Release
Thermo Fisher Scientific announced the launch of its new Invitrogen TaqMan & SYBR Green Fast Advanced Cells-to-CT Kits, further strengthening its line of RNA Cells-to-CT products. With the Fast Advanced Cells-to-CT Kits, researchers will experience a faster reverse transcriptase reaction and have access to a qPCR master mix system fully optimized to improve sensitivity to detect rare transcripts. This makes it possible to perform high-throughput expression analysis directly from cultured cells without RNA purification and without risking sensitivity. As with previous Cells-to-CT kits, the Fast Advanced Cells-to-CT Kits employ a five-minute lysis system to quickly lyse cultured cells while simultaneously removing genomic DNA (gDNA) and preserving RNA integrity. The proprietary Cells-to-CT Stop Solution irreversibly terminates the lysis reaction enabling users to carry the most sample into the RT and qPCR reactions to maximize the detection of RNA transcripts. Detecting rare RNA transcripts in low-input cell samples (10–1,000) is higher when samples are processed with Cells-to-CT kits compared to results from the same samples using RNA purification workflows. Now, the new Fast Advanced Cells-to-CT Kits are fully optimized with updated reverse transcription (RT) reagents for cDNA synthesis and faster TaqMan or SYBR Green master mixes for real-time PCR analysis. Press Release
Microbiotica announced that it has entered into a multi-year strategic collaboration with Genentech to discover, develop and commercialize biomarkers, targets, and medicines for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Under the terms of the agreement, Microbiotica will utilize its precision metagenomics microbiome platform to analyze patient samples from clinical trials of Genentech’s investigational IBD medicines, in order to identify microbiome biomarker signatures of drug response, novel IBD drug targets and live bacterial therapeutic products. Microbiotica will receive an undisclosed upfront payment and is eligible to receive research, development and commercialization milestone payments up to $534 million based on achievement of certain predetermined milestones. In addition, Microbiotica is eligible to receive royalties on sales of certain products resulting from the collaboration. Genentech also has an option to license assets that Microbiotica develops as a result of the research collaboration. Press Release
Fluidigm announced that it has entered into a co-marketing agreement with Genomenon to offer evidence-based genomic panel design services for translational and clinical disease research. The rapidly expanding knowledge base of genes and variants associated with human diseases is essential to delivering on the promise of precision medicine. However, harnessing the most up-to-date genetic and genomic information for the development of assays to answer critical research questions in health and disease is an ongoing challenge. The Genomenon Mastermind Panel Design Service is designed to meet this challenge by identifying disease-specific biomarkers for researchers using its proprietary Mastermind genomic search database and automated machine learning algorithms. The Genomenon team then curates the biomarkers based on the strength and quality of the scientific evidence found in the literature and delivers a set of prioritized candidates to researchers to aid in panel design. Through the Fluidigm-Genomenon joint panel design services offering, researchers will be able to accelerate the design of disease-specific next-generation sequencing (NGS), genotyping, and real-time PCR panels for use with highly efficient Fluidigm automated microfluidic systems. Significantly shortening the most time-consuming part of this process, manual target selection, Genomenon’s Panel Design Service can reduce the time of target identification from up to one year to just a few weeks. When combined with proven Fluidigm D3 design services for panel assay design, researchers can more efficiently develop scientifically robust genomic panels to meet the dynamic demands of translational and clinical disease research. Press Release