A Medical Device Daily

Illumina (San Diego) said it is partnering with the Center for Inherited Disease Research (CIDR; Bethesda, Maryland) to use Illumina's Sentrix HumanHap300 BeadChip and Infinium Assay for a pilot study of Type 2 diabetes.

One goal of this study is to evaluate the Illumina technology for adoption as the standard platform for CIDR's genome-wide association service to be offered to the scientific community in the spring of 2006.

CIDR is working with Illumina to genotype over 2500 case-control samples provided by the Finland-United States Investigation of NIDDM Genetics (FUSION) Study, funded by the NIH. The goal of FUSION is to map and identify genetic variants that predispose individuals to Type 2 diabetes (formerly non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, or NIDDM).

CIDR will use the Sentrix HumanHap300 BeadChip to query more than 317,000 tagSNPs on a single microarray device. The new BeadChip is powered by Illumina's Infinium Assay, which enables the intelligent selection and analysis of virtually any SNP in the genome.

In other agreement news:

• Eksigent Technologies (Dublin, California) said it has signed an agreement with Applied Biosystems (Foster City, California) for Applied to offer a new line of liquid chromatography (HPLC) systems based on Eksigent's technology, integrated with Applied Biosystems/MDS Sciex mass spectrometers (MS).

Applied Biosystems/MDS Sciex is a joint venture between Applied Biosystems Group and MDS Sciex, a division of MDS.

The new Tempo liquid chromatography (LC) systems will be sold by Applied Biosystems/MDS Sciex, including platforms for nano LC, high-throughput micro LC and an LC-MALDI deposition system. The Tempo systems are based on Eksigent's microfluidic flow control technology, which has been widely adopted in proteomics research for high sensitivity biomarker discovery and in pharmaceutical discovery applications for rapid, high-resolution LC-MS.

• Imagin Molecular (Oak Brook, Illinois) reported entering into an agreement with PET Management Services (PMS; Niagara, New York) for bioinformatics research and imaging center management.

PMS will assist Imagin Nuclear Partners (INP) to deliver specialized evidence-based solutions for cardiac diagnostics and treatments using that demonstrates cost savings to insurance companies when cardiac PET is performed on selected patients as a first line test rather than traditional single photon computed tomography (SPECT) scans.