By Aaron Krol
November 9, 2015 | QIAGEN’s GeneReader DNA sequencing system
was finally unveiled last week in Austin, Tex., at the annual meeting of
the Association for Molecular Pathology. The company had first planned
to launch the GeneReader in 2014, but ran into delays during early
access testing.
QIAGEN, an all-around molecular diagnostics company with a large
customer base in both clinical and research, has been planning an entry
into next-generation sequencing (NGS) since at least 2012, when it
acquired Intelligent Biosystems, a small genomics player from Waltham, Mass. QIAGEN has also picked up CLC bio and Ingenuity, two popular bioinformatics vendors, to build a software suite alongside its sequencing system.
QIAGEN is making a late entry into NGS, at a time when even
better-established vendors, like Thermo Fisher and Pacific Biosciences,
are fighting to hold onto a meaningful share of a market dominated by
Illumina of San Diego. But QIAGEN is not the only company that believes a
huge, untapped base of hospital labs will soon be using sequencers as
part of regular patient care, providing a chance for new technologies to
get a foothold.
Read the whole story at Bio-IT World.