A Medical Device Daily

Cepheid (Sunnyvale, California), a molecular diagnostics company, reported a nonexclusive agreement with VWR International (West Chester, Pennsylvania), a global distributor of scientific equipment, supplies, chemicals and furniture, to distribute Cepheid Industrial life science products in the U.S.

The agreement expands Cepheid's Industrial market reach in the U.S. by extending its domestic sales channel to reach more government, academic and biotechnology laboratories working with real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology.

VWR will distribute Cepheid's SmartCycler instrument system, SmartMix HM master mix, and associated accessories in the U.S.

The SmartCycler system is a real-time PCR testing platform for genetic analysis and detection with up to 96 individually programmable reaction sites.

The SmartMix HM product is a master mix in Cepheid's bead format. In an easy-to-use 2.6mm bead, it provides all the necessary reagents to perform PCR.

Affymetrix (Santa Clara, California) and NuGEN Technologies (San Carlos, California), a privately held company that develops and commercializes nucleic acid amplification and labeling systems for small and difficult samples, reported their agreement to co-market a solution that enables researchers to access FFPE (formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded) tissue samples derived from years of clinical studies previously inaccessible by traditional RNA amplification methods.

The NuGEN WT-Ovation FFPE System is designed to provide scientists the opportunity to conduct global gene expression analysis on their vast archives of small and degraded FFPE samples, using standard Affymetrix GeneChip 3' expression arrays.

The industry-standard Affymetrix 3' gene expression arrays enable researchers to simultaneously monitor genome-wide expression profiles.

NuGEN's WT-Ovation FFPE System requires 50 nanograms of total RNA from FFPE samples for consistent, linear amplification yielding several micrograms of cDNA. The process takes just six hours, and when used with NuGEN's FL-Ovation cDNA Biotin Module V2 for fragmentation and labeling, allows hybridization to GeneChip microarrays the same day.