RainDance introduces new panel for cancer mutation screening

RainDance Technologies, Inc., the Digital Biology™ company, today announced the worldwide availability of its new panel for cancer mutation screening research using any next-generation sequencing (NGS) system. The RainDance Cancer Hotspot Panel enables researchers to simultaneously interrogate more than 13,000 cancer "hotspots" across 54 genes.

“The Cancer Hotspot Panel enables complete coverage and high sequencing depth, and also delivers the high specificity and unbiased allelic representation that cancer research requires and has sorely lacked.”

Developed with researchers from the University of California, San Diego, the Cancer HotSpot Panel leverages RainDance's proprietary primer design pipeline to target relevant driver mutations in the genome and provide highly accurate, consistent, and reproducible results. When used in combination with the RainDance DeepSeq™ Solution, it also enables researchers to detect known mutations and discover new mutations represented in as little as 1-5 percent of a heterogeneous tumor. The results of RainDance's technology were recently cited in two peer-reviewed papers published in The New England Journal of Medicine and Genome Biology.

"We have been impressed with the performance of the RainDance platform for detecting somatic mutations," said Kelly A. Frazer, Ph.D., Professor of Pediatrics and Chief of the Division of Genome Information Sciences at the UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center. "We have already published data using the RainDance platform together with the Illumina MiSeq™ System and we anticipate the RainDance method to be our platform of choice for samples with low cellularity or with considerable heterogeneity."

"We are pleased to offer this new panel to the cancer research community which has been seeking solutions that better optimize their sequencing capacity and accelerate their sample-to-data workflow," said Andy Watson, Chief Marketing Officer at RainDance. "The Cancer Hotspot Panel enables complete coverage and high sequencing depth, and also delivers the high specificity and unbiased allelic representation that cancer research requires and has sorely lacked."

The Cancer HotSpot Panel is the latest addition to RainDance's portfolio of integrated cancer research analysis solutions, which consists of fully automated instrumentation (ThunderStorm™ System), a proprietary and customizable primer design pipeline, and consumables and reagents for applications including Targeted DNA Sequencing, ultra-deep sequencing of FFPE and fresh frozen samples (DeepSeq™ Solution), cancer pathway analysis (ONCOSeq™ Panel), methylation analysis (MethylSeq™ Solution) and digital PCR (RainDrop™ System).