Caris, GenScript, Fuzionaire, and More: News From December 2019

December 23, 2019 | December featured exciting new, products, and partnerships from around the bio-IT community from innovating companies, organizations, and universities, including Caris, GenScript, Fuzionaire, and more. 

Caris Life Sciences and Ambry Genetics announced that Caris will begin offering Ambry’s 67-gene CancerNext-Expanded panel to evaluate the hereditary risks for cancer. Combined with Caris’ somatic (tumor) tests that analyze a cancer’s detailed molecular makeup, Caris will provide patients and their healthcare providers unparalleled information to more accurately diagnose and treat cancer. This will be the most comprehensive, clinically relevant molecular and genetic offering on the market today to guide treatment and management of cancer. “We are committed to providing clinicians with high-quality information they can use to inform treatment decisions,” David D. Halbert, Caris Life Sciences Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, said in a press release. “By partnering with Ambry Genetics to better inform patient care, we are able to provide clinicians a greater ability to learn about a cancer’s molecular composition.” Ambry’s CancerNext-Expanded hereditary cancer panel analyzes 67 genes associated with an increased hereditary risk of cancer, including brain, breast, colon, ovarian, pancreatic, prostate, renal, uterine, and many other cancers. Its comprehensive testing identifies inherited risks for cancer in order for clinicians to accurately diagnose, treat, and manage cancer risks for each patient’s needs. “To best diagnose and treat cancer, clinicians must understand whether patients have mutations in genes associated with an increased risk for hereditary cancer,” said Aaron Elliott, Chief Executive Officer of Ambry, in an official statement. “Caris’ molecular tests combined with Ambry’s germline genetic testing, give clinicians the most comprehensive, clinically relevant molecular profile on the market to guide treatment and management.” The combined Caris and Ambry testing is now available nationwide. Press release

GenScript announced the launch of its Precision Mutant Library Services for the drug development, industrial chemical and synthetic biology markets. The service overcomes the challenges of traditional library construction methods, saving researchers valuable screening time, expediting drug discovery and reducing costs. Mutant libraries are powerful, high-throughput tools for optimizing protein structure and function. However, traditional methods for library construction, including error-prone PCR or degenerate methods, suffer from limited control over codon usage and poor variant representation. These limitations require researchers to perform multiple rounds of screening to capture the entire variation of the library. The new Precision Mutant Library Services utilizes GenScript's proprietary semiconductor oligo synthesis technology to deliver precise control over each synthesized variant. The result is a more diverse and fully covered mutant library with unbiased distribution. "GenScript was able to create a mutant library that had 100% coverage of all expected variants before and after viral packaging, and excluded variants that contained amino acids that I did not want present at these sites," Susan Butler, a PhD student in Junghae Suh's Synthetic Virology Lab at Rice University who was working to create a library of mutant caspids for adeno-associated vectors, said in a press release. "Having a library with only the variants that I wanted to test was able to reduce my screening efforts and maximize my time in finding my optimal viral vector sequence."  GenScript's  patented  semiconductor technology-based platform uses CMOS technology to construct integrated circuit chips, providing electronic control over oligonucleotide synthesis and allowing precise control of the composition and proportions of amino acids at one or multiple variant sites in a single protein. Although degenerate NNK and NNS libraries have proved economical, scientists waste valuable screening time due to the poor representation of variants and desired amino acids at certain positions. Press release

Fuzionaire Radioisotope Technologies (FRIT) announced a collaborative research agreement with the Department of Nuclear Medicine and Tracer Kinetics at Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine. The collaboration will use Fuzionaire Dx’s proprietary chemistry and Osaka’s unique clinical and radiochemistry capabilities to accelerate the discovery of novel anti-cancer radiotherapeutic agents. The joint research effort aims to produce therapeutic molecules that contain astatine-211, a radioactive isotope, as the tumor-destroying payload. Astatine-211 emits alpha particles, which have enough energy to destroy cells. Unlike available treatments that emit beta particles, alpha particles penetrate a very limited distance, typically a depth of only a few cells. This makes it possible for alpha particles to treat isolated cancer cells, disseminated tumors, micrometastases, and supplement conventional therapies that may leave undetectable tumors that could lead to a recurrence. The initial research collaboration aims to identify clinical candidates for different oncology indications. The collaboration will also further explore Fuzionaire Dx’s fluorine-18 radiochemistry platform, which can produce radiopharmaceuticals that identify and localize cancerous tissue in positron emission tomography (PET) scans prior to radiotherapeutic intervention, enabling better treatment stratification and monitoring of patient response. Primary leadership for the scientific collaboration includes Tadashi Watabe, Assistant Professor in the Department of Nuclear Medicine and Tracer Kinetics at Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, and Anton Toutov, Chief Science Officer of Fuzionaire Dx. Press release

TTP Labtech has announced its corporate name change to SPT Labtech, effective from January 6, 2020. The change of name is a contractual requirement of its divestment from TTP Group in 2018 with the backing of technology-focused investment firm Battery Ventures. In an official statement, David Newble, Managing Director of TTP Labtech, said, “As SPT Labtech, we will remain deeply committed to solving our life science customers' toughest research problems by leveraging our world-leading application knowledge and engineering capabilities.” Press release

New England Biolabs (NEB) announced an expansion of its RNA depletion product portfolio to support more-sensitive and cost-effective RNA sequencing via next generation sequencing platforms. The NEBNext RNase H-based RNA depletion protocol offers efficient and specific depletion of the abundant RNA species that interfere with the analysis of both coding and non-coding RNAs of biological significance. The newly-released NEBNext Globin & rRNA Depletion Kit (Human/Mouse/Rat) and NEBNext rRNA Depletion Kit (Bacteria) complement the existing NEBNext rRNA Depletion Kit (Human/Mouse/Rat). All kits are available both with and without RNA Sample Purification Beads, and have a 2-hour workflow, requiring less than 10 minutes of hands-on time. The kits also support a broad range of input amounts of total RNA, from low ng to 1 µg, and are effective with intact or degraded RNA. The NEBNext rRNA Depletion Kit (Bacteria) removes the abundant bacterial rRNAs (5S, 16S, and 23S) resulting in the enrichment of bacterial mRNAs and non-coding RNAs of interest. This method is targeted to both gram-positive and gram-negative organisms, and is effective with RNA from monocultures or mixed bacterial species, such as those used in metatranscriptome studies. "Bacterial mRNA's lack of a poly(A) tail reduces the options for isolation of biologically relevant RNA species for cost-effective analysis. This new kit addresses the inability to use oligo d(T)-based methods to enrich mRNAs of interest from bacterial samples, by instead efficiently removing the more-abundant rRNAs, across a range of bacterial species," stated Fiona Stewart, Portfolio Marketing Manager for NEBNext, in a press release. "By taking the dominant rRNAs out of the equation, it becomes easier to see the true picture." These new NEBNext RNA depletion kits complement the NEBNext products for RNA library preparation, including the Ultra II Directional RNA Library Prep Kit for Illumina and the NEBNext Library Quant Kit for Illumina, as well as the Monarch Total RNA Miniprep Kit. Press release

NVIDIA recently announced its AI platform for healthcare, Clara, is being adopted by multiple healthcare and genomics companies, including BGI, United Imaging, and Ping An. In a blog post, the company detailed the particulars of each partnership, from BGI’s flow cell technology and acceleration being enhanced by a pair of NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs, making BGI’s DNBSEQ-T7 sequencing system the highest throughput genome sequencer to date. United Imaging’s total body PET-CT scanner uses 16 NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs and eight 56 GB/s InfiniBand network links from Mellanox to process movie-like scans that can acquire up to a terabyte of data. The system is already deployed in the US at the University of California, Davis, where scientists helped design the system. “Further afield, a growing number of smart medical devices are using AI for enhanced signal and image processing, workflow optimizations and data analysis,” Kimberly Powell, VP of Healthcare at NVIDIA, wrote on the company’s blog. “And on the horizon are patient monitors that can sense when a patient is in danger and smart endoscopes that can guide surgeons during surgery. It’s no exaggeration to state that, in the future, every sensor in the hospital will have AI-infused capabilities.” NVIDIA’s recently announced NVIDIA Clara AGX developer kit helps address this trend, Powell writes.. Clara AGX comprises hardware based on NVIDIA Xavier SoCs and Volta Tensor Core GPUs, along with a Clara AGX software development kit, to enable the proliferation of smart medical devices that make healthcare both smarter and more personal. Blog