Fluidigm and Genomenon to Offer Evidence-Based Genomic Panel Design Services

Joint offering enables acceleration of genomic panel design for translational and clinical disease research

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., June 7, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE)— Fluidigm Corporation announced today that it has entered into a co-marketing agreement with Genomenon to offer evidence-based genomic panel design services for translational and clinical disease research.

The rapidly expanding knowledge base of genes and variants associated with human diseases is essential to delivering on the promise of precision medicine. However, harnessing the most up-to date genetic and genomic information for the development of assays to answer critical research questions in health and disease is an ongoing challenge. The Genomenon® Mastermind® Panel Design Service is designed to meet this challenge by identifying disease-specific biomarkers for researchers using its proprietary Mastermind genomic search database and automated machine learning algorithms. The Genomenon team then curates the biomarkers based on the strength and quality of the scientific evidence found in the literature and delivers a set of prioritized candidates to researchers to aid in panel design.

Through the Fluidigm-Genomenon joint panel design services offering, researchers will be able to accelerate the design of disease-specific next-generation sequencing (NGS), genotyping, and realtime PCR panels for use with highly efficient Fluidigm® automated microfluidic systems. Significantly shortening the most time-consuming part of this process, manual target selection, Genomenon’s Panel Design Service can reduce the time of target identification from up to one year to just a few weeks. When combined with proven Fluidigm D3™ design services for panel assay design, researchers can more efficiently develop scientifically robust genomic panels to meet the dynamic demands of translational and clinical disease research.

“Starting with any target set of diseases, Fluidigm and Genomenon together can provide an expert level gene panel in record time,” said Mike Klein, CEO of Genomenon. “We’ve proven the model with a number of NGS panels in collaboration with Fluidigm and are excited to open this up to custom designs for Fluidigm customers.”

“We are very excited to announce our relationship with Genomenon to accelerate the design of high value disease-specific panels both for our customers and in our own internal assay design pipeline,” said Chris Linthwaite, President and CEO of Fluidigm. “This valuable addition to our custom genomic panel design offering represents an important building block in expanding the benefits of microfluidics technology to a wider range of disease research areas.”