from GenomeWeb
NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Aiming to simplify and improve the targeted sequencing workflow, LC Sciences is building out its VariantPro multiplexing PCR technology with an eye on a fourth quarter launch.
The company is in the midst of testing the technology and recently sent out a call for beta testers to, among other things, generate test datasets for the technology. If all goes as planned, LC Sciences anticipates making VariantPro available as part of its service offerings in the fourth quarter, followed shortly afterward by a launch of the technology as a kit for researchers to run in their own laboratories. If successful, it would make the technology the second commercially available product from the Houston-based biotechnology firm…
Chris Hebel, LC Sciences’ vice president of business development, told GenomeWeb that VariantPro does away with primer-specific variation in the amplification process. “You’ve got tens, hundreds, thousands of different primer pairs that have different thermodynamic efficiencies, so some amplicons are going to be overrepresented” compared to others.
A researcher can eliminate the primer-specific variation by selecting targets with specific primers in only the first few cycles, “but if you then amplify targets using those specific primers … you’d have that variation exponentially amplified.”
With VariantPro, though, a researcher can capture the amplicons in the first couple of cycles, and starting with the third cycle, the scientist can begin the common primer amplification, “which is just a single PCR reaction. There’s no variation due to differences in primers,” Hebel said.
With VariantPro, the two steps are contained within the same PCR reaction “based on the design of the primers, the temperature, [and] the concentration of the primers in the reaction,” he said. “That has enabled this automatic switch.”
