- Bio-Rad (BIO -0.1%) and Illumina (ILMN +0.3%) enter into an exclusive partnership to develop the most comprehensive next-generation sequencing (NGS) workflow for single-cell analysis. The end-to-end commercial system will enable high throughput sequencing of thousands of individual cells, historically a time-consuming, costly and laborious process.
- Single-cell gene expression data provide much better cell function, disease progression and therapeutic response information than studies performed on bulk tissue samples with which gene expression data are averaged across cells due to the presence of multiple cell types with different functions. In neurological tissues, for example, there are hundreds of specialized cell types so being able to isolate them for genetic analysis would be of profound interest to drug developers as well as researchers.
- The companies expect to launch the system no later than early 2017.