Roche Signs Licensing Agreement with Sysmex Inostics GmbH
Roche recently announced a licensing agreement with Sysmex Inostics GmbH for its emPCR portfolio of patents. Under the terms of the licensing agreement, Roche grants Sysmex Inostics GmbH a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-bearing license.
Through emulsion PCR (emPCR), each DNA molecule is individually isolated within its own bubble in a water/oil emulsion, which includes a capture bead and PCR amplification reagents. As a result, even though about a million molecules are prepared simultaneously, each molecule is individually amplified to one single bead, the equivalent of having a million separate PCR reactions. This technique allows for massive parallelization (high throughput) that results in a significant cost advantage over Sanger sequencing.
Sysmex Inostics GmbH is primarily a clinical service lab providing analysis of free circulating tumor-DNA in plasma for prediction of drug response and for monitoring of cancer by quantifying the amount of tumor DNA to detect relapse and to detect resistance mutations, utilizing emPCR technology. Actual Sysmex Inostics GmbH customers are pharmaceutical companies and academic and medical centers who use Sysmex Inostics services in clinical trials in which tissue collection is a problem.
“Roche has an active out-licensing program for its emPCR-based intellectual property portfolio,” said Dan Zabrowski, Head of Roche Sequencing Unit. “By continuing to out-license this technology, we contribute to the development of well-validated techniques within the molecular diagnostics field.”
Sysmex Inostics, a subsidiary of Sysmex Corporation, is a molecular diagnostic company whose core competency is mutation detection utilizing highly sensitive technologies, such as Plasma-Sequencing and BEAMing. With BEAMing being one of the most sensitive and quantitative technologies available today for the detection of tumor-specific somatic mutations in blood samples, Sysmex Inostics’ BEAMing services are readily available to support clinical trials and research in oncology. Furthermore, Sysmex Inostics companion diagnostics (CDx) team offers services for the development of non-invasive plasma DNA-based IVD tests supported by a growing network of partners to cover the entire IVD development process. In addition, BEAMing tests (OncoBEAM) are available through a CLIA certified laboratory for routine clinical analysis. Sysmex Inostics’ headquarters are located in Hamburg, Germany, and Sysmex Inostics’ Clinical Laboratory is located in Baltimore, MD. For more information, visit www.sysmex-inostics.com
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