SPT Labtech Ltd. recently partnered with Alithea Genomics SA to integrate its firefly liquid handling platform with Alithea’s single-cell RNA-sequency technology to create a scalable and reproducible workflow for transcriptomics research.

Billiontoone Inc. saw its shares surge well beyond the already upsized $60 IPO price, opening at $100 each, giving the molecular diagnostics company a market value of $4.4 billion based on the outstanding shares listed in its filings.

Oxford Nanopore Technologies plc and Biomérieux SA launched Ampore-TB, a research use only test that can rapidly detect mutations linked to antimicrobial resistance in tuberculosis. With multidrug-resistant TB affecting an estimated 400,000 people annually and increasing risks of morbidity and mortality, this assay could help with earlier diagnosis of drug resistance in patients.

Roche Holdings AG received CE mark approval for its Elecsys Dengue Ag test, a fully automated, high-throughput immunoassay to help diagnose acute dengue virus infections. With cases of dengue on the rise worldwide, the test, which delivers results in 18 minutes, offers high sensitivity and specificity across all four dengue virus serotypes, and will help clinicians confidently distinguish dengue from other illnesses causing acute fever.

Australian scientists have developed a simpler, less invasive way to detect Alzheimer’s disease that could make it easier for patients to access emerging disease-modifying therapies. Researchers from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation have identified blood-based biomarker tests capable of confirming amyloid plaque in the brain with accuracy comparable to the current gold standards using positron emission tomography scans and lumbar punctures.

Genedx LLC partnered with Illumina Inc. to test whether Illumina's constellation map read technology could shed light on hard-to-detect variants that appear in rare diseases. Constellation met or exceeded the ability of other sequencing methods to detect variants implicated in multiple disorders and worked across a range of sample types, a study presented at the American Society for Human Genetics (ASHG) Annual Meeting in Boston on Oct. 15 found.

Ottobock SE & Co. KGaA got the Frankfurt Stock Exchange on its feet and dancing with Germany’s largest IPO in more than 18 months Oct. 9. The €808 million (US$934.23 million) gave the prosthetics company a market capitalization of €4.2 billion (US$4.88 billion), which rapidly rose as the share price shot up from €66 to €72 at the start of trading. The second med-tech to go public in October should have more company soon, with U.S. molecular diagnostics company Billiontoone Inc. filing Oct. 7 for an IPO with placeholder value of $100 million.

Roche Holdings AG received CE-mark for the Kidney Klinrisk algorithm, an AI-based tool developed in collaboration with Klinrisk Inc. to stratify risk and assess the progressive decline in kidney function. The software will help clinicians to make more informed decisions when accessing adults with chronic kidney disease as well as individuals with diabetes or hypertension who are at elevated risk of kidney function decline.

Owlstone Medical Ltd. has been awarded up to $49.1 million in funding by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to develop over-the-counter, at-home, cancer screening tests. These tests will be able to accurately detect more than 30 cancers as early as stage I, when tumors are still small and survival rates are highest, revolutionizing the field of cancer detection and improving patient outcomes.