Caliper Life Sciences is reporting the sale of its Sciclone® NGS Workstation to the Center for Genome Analysis at Yale University and the Genetic Laboratory of the department of internal medicine at Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The platform can prep 480 libraries per week and carry out 192 exome captures per week, with flexibility to run between eight and 96 samples per run, according to Caliper.
The Center for Genome Analysis at Yale will use the technology combined with the LabChip® GXI to automate protocols for its exome-capture and library-preparation workflows. The purchase was intended “to improve key bottlenecks in the Illumina HiSeq2000® NGS sample preparation process," says Shrikant Mane, Ph.D., director of Yale’s genome analysis center.
Dr. Mane also notes that the systems are flexible enough to enable future automation of protocols for the Pacific Biosciences sequencing workflow. Built on the Sciclone G3 platform, the NGS Workstation is positioned as a complete benchtop solution for library prep, sequence capture, and normalization.
The Genetic Laboratory of the department of internal medicine at Erasmus will utilize the Sciclone NGS Workstation along with Roche's NimbleGen SeqCap EZ Exome Library to automate the capture of more than 3,000 samples for next-generation sequencing.
The sequencing is being conducted as part of the Rotterdam Study, a prospective, single-center, population-based cohort study in a suburb of Rotterdam designed to characterize and analyze age-related disorders and their risk factors. The study includes 15,000 participants aged 45 years or more who have been followed since 1990.
A key focus of the study is identifying genetic risk factors for age-related disorders such as osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer disease, and type 2 diabetes. To that end, the genetic laboratory established a Genome Wide Association Study database in 2007.
By using an automated exome sequencing sample preparation solution, the Erasmus MC team says that it anticipates completing the processing and sequencing of 3,000 samples in the next 3–4 months. The first data is expected to be available for analysis this fall.
Yale and Erasmus are among a range of sequencing companies and institutions that have purchased NGS products from Caliper in recent months. Caliper listed numerous other customers including Children's Mercy Hospital of Kansas City, Complete Genomics, Edge BioSystems, ELIM Biopharm, The Genome Analysis Centre, HudsonAlpha Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sequenom, University of Connecticut Health Center, the University of Maryland, University of Queensland, UMC Groningen, and Vanderbilt University.