Cambridge, UK – January 26 2021 – The cost of library preparation is one of the biggest obstacles to large next-generation sequencing (NGS) studies, slowing down the pace of insights from infectious disease surveillance, cancer research and beyond. At the Festival of Genomics, SPT Labtech announced an initiative with Thermo Fisher Scientific to co-market solutions that will enable variant detection at a fraction of the cost.

Sensitive variant detection can now be achieved at one-tenth of the library prep cost through miniaturization with the SPT Labtech mosquito HV genomics and SPT Labtech dragonfly discovery systems.

By positioning Thermo Fisher’s NGS library preparation kits with the SPT Labtech mosquito HV genomics and SPT Labtech dragonfly discovery systems, reagent volumes requirements are reduced which lower cost and increase the number of replicates for a library preparation.

The initiative will initially support Invitrogen Collibri DNA Library Prep Kits for Illumina Systems and Collibri Library Quantification Kits for use in infectious disease studies, including SARS-CoV-2 research, copy number variation within cancer research, and other variant detection applications.

"Driving down the cost of NGS library construction without sacrificing quality of results represents a big step toward democratizing science," said Joby Jenkins, director of product strategy for SPT Labtech. "NGS technology evolves quickly and it can be time consuming for individual labs to automate the newest library prep kits. Our goal is to automate and miniaturize processes for NGS so scientists can expand the scope of their research programs and, ultimately, generate insights into human health."

The Collibri DNA Library Prep Kits for Illumina Systems enable sensitive and reproducible variant detection from small amounts of challenging samples. The mosquito HV genomics and dragonfly discovery systems will allow for more streamlined processing of samples at a reduced cost for applications such as disease research.

For more information, please visit www.thermofisher.com/collibri-SPT.