CAMBRIDGE, England--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Population Genetics Technologies Ltd (PGT) has exclusively licensed patent rights including US 8,481,292 covering its VeriTag™ technology to Agilent Technologies. PGT retains exclusive rights to develop and commercialize VeriTag™ for applications in human infectious disease diagnostics, and non-exclusive rights for veterinary diagnostics and plant genomic uses. VeriTag™ is a PGT proprietary technology which allows for the sensitive and confident detection of minority genetic variants on next generation sequencing platforms to levels below 0.1%.
Commenting on the deal, Population Genetics CEO Alan Schafer said, “VeriTag™ technology provides significant advantage in applications where it is essential to confidently identify low level mutations, such as clinical detection of drug resistance mutations; VeriTags’™ uses are broad and will increasingly be applied in diverse contexts such as cancer and metagenomic applications. Agilent represents the ideal commercialization partner for us because of their global reach and cross-platform business model.”
Financial terms were not disclosed.
About Population Genetics Technologies Ltd
Population Genetics Technologies Ltd was founded in 2005 by Nobel Laureate Dr Sydney Brenner; by Dr Sam Eletr, a founder of Applied Biosystems and of Lynx Therapeutics; and by Dr Philip Goelet, the founder of Molecular Tool and Red Abbey Ventures. The company develops and applies innovative approaches to genetic analyses and molecular diagnostics, including proprietary technologies that transform the economic viability of performing large scale genetic population studies, and that allow the sensitive and high confidence detection of rare variants and mutations for use in research and clinical decision making.
PGT was supported in the transaction by Inverness Advisors, a division of Kema Partners LLC.
