WaferGen Bio-systems and Qiagen to co-promote NGS products in Japan
Singapore: WaferGen Bio-systems announced a co-marketing agreement with Qiagen for the promotion of certain products in Japan in the areas of genomics platforms such as Next-Gen sequencing (NGS) and qPCR. The venture will provide WaferGen's SmartChip solution to facilitate biomarker validation and will also offer customers Qiagen's PCRarrays on the SmartChip and subsequently compatible NGS panels from Qiagen.
Under the terms of the agreement, Qiagen and WaferGen will promote and market each other's products in Japan, specifically WaferGen's SmartChip platform and Qiagen's NGS platform which is currently in an advanced stage of development. The two teams will be working closely together in terms of developing the overall strategy and tactical plan that will maximize the commercial opportunity for both companies.
Mr Stephane Perrey, president, Qiagen, said that, "There is a substantial customer need to ramp up discovery efforts through targeted screening and confirmation, and our integrated approach will provide one-stop shopping for a variety of academic and industrial clients. We have successfully evaluated WaferGen's SmartChip System, and we believe that it can play an important role in our comprehensive product offering."
Mr Ivan Trifunovich , president and CEO, WaferGen, said that, "Since our July, 2012 launch of our MyDesign open format instrument, we have received enthusiastically positive reviews from our early test sites and commercial customers in the US and Europe. In conjunction with our highly-regarded partner, we look forward to building on these results in Japan. We are confident that our three-part value proposition - platform flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and no need for pre-amplification - will be strong drivers of customers' interest."
