Agilent launches two new clinical cancer research products

Agilent Technologies has announced the launch of two new clinical cancer research products that can be used to improve the speed and accuracy of variant detection.

The first of these is HaloPlex HS, a high-sensitivity amplicon-based targeted sequencing method for accurately identifying low-frequency somatic variants in solid tumours and haematological cancers.

It is one of the first commercially available high-sensitivity target-enrichment technologies for next-generation sequencing, incorporating more than one million unique molecular barcodes for accurate detection of alleles at low frequencies.

Meanwhile, ClearSeq is an off-the-shelf cancer research panel, developed in collaboration with Washington University, that provides an accelerated solution for the analysis of oncogenes and tumour suppressors.

It is capable of targeting 151 key oncology genes containing disease-associated variants.

Jacob Thaysen, president of Agilent's diagnostics and genomics group, said: "These latest additions to Agilent's portfolio of sequencing solutions provide innovative methods to enable the identification of important variants with greater accuracy than what is available today."