Hitachi High-Technologies, QIAGEN team up in strategic collaboration

TOKYO & HILDEN, Germany—Hitachi High-Technologies Corp. and QIAGEN N.V. have begun a long-term strategic collaboration featuring several initiatives to help advance molecular testing. Hitachi brings with it experience in industrialized instrument development and manufacturing technologies, particularly in the life-sciences and in-vitro diagnostics industries, while QIAGEN provides expertise in molecular Sample to Insight solution for the life sciences and clinical diagnostics. No financial details for the collaboration were disclosed.

“This new strategic partnership with Hitachi High-Technologies will form a very powerful platform to create new molecular testing solutions. Hitachi High-Technologies is a recognized leader in industrial automation and has a proven track record of innovation as well as a significant presence in the Asia-Pacific region,” commented Thierry Bernard, senior vice president, head of the Molecular Diagnostics Business Area and a member of QIAGEN's executive committee. “Combining the NGS-related and other molecular know-how of QIAGEN with the instrumentation expertise of Hitachi High-Technologies will enable us to bring innovative automation solutions to customers all over the world and across the continuum from basic research through to routine molecular diagnostics.”

The collaboration will initially focus on two projects, namely developing new automation systems based on PCR and next-generation sequencing technologies. QIAGEN and Hitachi agree that the collaboration could be expanded in the future to include co-commercialization of products in certain geographic markets.

“QIAGEN and Hitachi High-Technologies share much the same corporate culture such as customer focus as well as a commitment to technology and quality leadership,” Yasukuni Koga, head of Medical Systems Sales and Marketing Division of Hitachi High-Technologies, said in a press release. “We believe those are crucial for the collaboration to achieve a meaningful position in the rapidly changing and highly competitive markets of in-vitro diagnostics and life sciences, applying genetic engineering. Moreover, developing a co-commercialization collaboration with distribution and customer service in specific geographical regions would be highly accepted by customers of each company.”

In other recent partnering news for QIAGEN, on June 8 the company, along with Inova Translational Medicine Institute (ITMI), announced the commercial launch of Inova Genomes, a compendium of ethnically, phenotypically and ancestrally diverse whole-genome sequencing data for researchers that want to accelerate cohort analysis programs or improve success rates in diagnostic odyssey cases. ITMI built the data set from a collection of more than 7,000 whole genomes derived from more than 2,800 families. QIAGEN will be the exclusive distributor of the Inova Genomes database, which is accessible via QIAGEN's secure, integrated Ingenuity Variant Analysis and CLC Biomedical Genomics Workbench platforms.