BGI Partners with Life Technologies

Life Technologies Corporation and BGI jointly announced that BGI has purchased 37 Ion Proton™ Sequencers and plans to add at least a dozen more by the end of the year, strengthening the organization's leadership position in the genomics industry. BGI also signed a supply and licensing agreement with Life Technologies, further enhancing BGI's ability to perform basic, agricultural and clinical research.

The addition of the Ion Torrent™ to BGI's current broad array of technology platforms will facilitate its goal of accelerating and expanding the organization's strong presence in all areas of next-generation sequencing and clinical research, ranging from exome and transcriptome sequencing to aneuploidy testing to whole genome analysis.

BGI has already validated the Ion Proton™ System in several applications.  The Ion Proton™ Sequencer has consistently delivered over 80 million high-quality sequencing reads in 2-3 hour sequencing runs on the Ion PI™ Chip in BGI's labs.

"We have been working with the Ion Proton™ platform on major applications for the last several months and it has passed every test," said Jun Wang, director of BGI. "It is flexible and affordable, so we can quickly deploy it in many satellite labs around the world for all applications. The Ion Proton™ is also very fast, enabling us to provide our customers and partners results in days, not weeks, which is extremely important for clinical research applications. The upcoming Ion PII™ Chip is expected to significantly expand sequencing capacity on the same Ion Proton™ Sequencer and our plan is to migrate additional applications to the Ion Proton platform."

"BGI's commitment to the Ion Proton™ platform is the ultimate validation that our breakthrough benchtop sequencing technology delivers more value than the big sequencers that have dominated the market for so long," said Life Technologies' Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Gregory T. Lucier. "By setting a new standard for speed, simplicity, price and performance, the Ion Proton™ System has become the choice of the world's largest genomics center, and yet it's still accessible to virtually any lab."

In just three years, Ion Torrent™ has become the bestselling benchtop sequencer brand in the world by bringing the transformative power of semiconductor technology to sequencing. The Ion Proton™ Sequencer is just a fraction of the cost of other sequencers to buy and to run, and it delivers sequence in just a few hours, compared to 10 days or more for competitors. This makes Ion Torrent™ technology ideal for both small labs and large-scale platform developer like BGI.