Bio-Rad Laboratories has already put its stamp on 2017, announcing Monday that it will acquire RainDance Technologies for an undisclosed sum.
A Bio-Rad spokesperson declined to comment on the deal, which will be finalized at the end of Q1. More details are expected in an upcoming earnings call.
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The news comes less than a week after the launch of the Illumina Bio-Rad Single-Cell Sequencing Solution, announced during the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. Combined, the two deals strengthen the company’s position in the high buzz fields of single-cell analysis and liquid biopsy.
Based in Hercules, California, Bio-Rad is a giant in the life science research world, producing reagents, assays and tools, with over $2.1 billion in revenue in 2015.
RainDance has a more focused portfolio, primarily known for its droplet-based technologies for digital PCR (dPCR). More recently, it has been developing tools for single-cell analysis after withdrawing from a scheduled IPO in 2015 and subsequently restructuring.
With dPCR, the researcher is trying to quantify levels of certain nucleic acids. If he or she tests the sample directly, the results could be hit or miss. Droplet-based technologies increase precision and reliability by partitioning the sample into as many as 10 million picoliter-sized droplets. These are then amplified in a controlled and reliable way and tagged with fluorescent molecules. If the droplet contains the target molecule it will glow. If it doesn’t, it won’t. By counting these yes or no responses, the researcher can reliably quantify the total number of target molecules in a sample with high sensitivity.
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That sensitivity is critical in the emerging field of liquid biopsies. Researchers need to be able to accurately isolate small fragments of DNA, including circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), from the blood of cancer patients. Failure to do so could produce a false diagnosis with potentially fatal consequences.
Bio-Rad clearly sees an important role for droplet-based dPCR in the future, for liquid biopsies and as a tool to enhance next-generation sequencing workflows. Acquiring RainDance will help fortify its market position.
“The company’s droplet-based solutions will extend our reach into next generation sequencing applications and strengthen our position in the area of Droplet Digital PCR,” said Norman Schwartz, Bio-Rad president and CEO in the company news release. “We look forward to expanding our offering to provide life science and clinical diagnostics customers with solutions for a wide range of nucleic acid detection applications.”
Single-cell sequencing is another major trend in genomics research, particularly in oncology. It allows researchers to understand an individual’s cancer on a cell-by-cell basis, scaling-up from that point to draw conclusions about the wider tumor.
This runs counter to the standard sequencing approach of analyzing small tissue samples or a population of cells. The problem here is that rapidly-mutating cancer cells are very heterogeneous. Important findings can be diminished when many thousands or millions of cells are analyzed together. Individual mutations and protein expression can also be lost in the noise.
The differences between cancer cells are even more profound when looking at RNA expression, noted a Nature Methods editorial on single-cell analysis. It is this area that the Illumina-Bio-Rad partnership will focus on to make the technology more mainstream.
Deals aside, there is plenty of competition in both fields from companies such as Fluidigm, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Sigma-Aldrich. Watch this space.
Photo: Ian Waldie, Getty Images
