SIGMA-ALDRICH EXPANDS POSITION IN WHOLE GENOME AMPLIFICATION WITH RIGHTS TO PROVIDE WGA TECHNOLOGY FOR SERVICE

Sigma-Aldrich (Nasdaq: SIAL), a leading $1.7 billion Life Science company, is pleased to announce a new licensing agreement with Rubicon Genomics that allows Sigma to offer GenomePlex® Whole Genome Amplification (WGA) kits to service providers.

Under this agreement, Sigma-Aldrich may sell GenomePlex kits to companies offering Whole Genome Amplification Services, thus expanding the service market to archived samples, FFPE and single cells. Rubicon Genomics will retain all rights to WGA for molecular diagnostics, and will continue its existing service business.

“This licensing agreement enables Sigma-Aldrich to partner with service providers that offer genetic processing capabilities and expertise,” said Keith Jolliff, Director of Strategic Marketing at Sigma-Aldrich. “Market Research shows that thirty percent of customers are currently using service companies for WGA. However, service providers have been limited in their ability to amplify DNA from damaged or degraded sources, such as FFPE or archived samples, and from single cells. This agreement allows Sigma-Aldrich to more broadly share our enhancements of the GenomePlex technology to enable service providers to more effectively meet the needs of researchers.”

In 2004 Sigma-Aldrich announced an exclusive licensing agreement with Rubicon Genomics to further develop and commercialize the GenomePlex WGA technology, a highly sensitive, accurate and proprietary method of amplifying genomic DNA from any organism. At that time, Rubicon Genomics retained all rights to WGA for molecular diagnostics and services. Sigma-Aldrich’s success with the GenomePlex technology has led to the development of several kits that offer robust and accurate amplification. The latest addition to the product family is the GenomePlex Single Cell WGA Kit, which supports whole genome amplification from a single cell and results in a million-fold amplification of genomic DNA.

GenomePlex is a proprietary amplification method based on random fragmentation of the genome into a series of overlapping, short templates. The resulting shorter DNA strands are efficiently primed and amplified to generate a library of DNA fragments with defined 3’ and 5’ termini, or the OmniPlex® library. This library is replicated using a linear, isothermal amplification in the initial stages, followed by a limited round of geometric (PCR) amplifications.