By Alexandra Sommer

The drive to make healthcare more targeted and more personalized has accelerated the application of increasingly sophisticated technologies, such as next generation sequencing (NGS). The result has been the introduction of some NGS-based tests to be used to direct targeted therapies to the right patient. The power is great, but the challenges are many, including how to standardize for routine use.

By Rick Luedke

You may be convinced that your academic research laboratory is humming along just fine and cannot benefit from, take the time to consider, and perhaps most of all, afford adding automation to your workflow.

By Jon Smith

If you’ve decided to take advantage of next generation sequencing (NGS) for HLA typing, your timing couldn’t be better.  With the recent introduction of more affordable bench-top sequencers and targeted HLA sequencing panels, NGS is more accessible than ever.  Of course, integration of a new technology into a busy lab takes careful planning to avoid teething problems, so now is the time to consider the impact an NGS system will have on your lab, and what you can do to make the transition as smooth as possible.   

By Severin Heynen

With multiple tests to perform on a tiny volume, samples are getting more precious. And as Next Generation Sequencing pushes the envelope on cost and throughput, scientists are looking for ways of reducing reagent volumes without compromising on quality. Tecan has a tip.

By Jon Smith

For patients in need of vital transplants, fast and accurate tissue typing can mean earlier treatment and a better chance of survival.  Next generation sequencing (NGS) is revolutionizing human leukocyte antigen (HLA) typing by providing allele-level resolution in a single high-throughput step. 

By Jon Smith

They don’t take up much room in your DNA – a mere 4 megabases on the short arm of Chromosome 6 – but Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) genes play a defining role in whether you will develop an autoimmune disorder, fend off an infectious disease, or have an adverse reaction to potentially life-saving treatments. 

By Achim von Leoprechting

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) is poised to become a decisive tool in diagnostic, therapeutic, and prognostic applications in oncology. In the first part of this two-part series, we saw that sequencing tumor-derived DNA alone can risk incorrect diagnosis by misinterpreting somatic alterations as being tumor-specific. This pinpoints the need to sequence normal tissue in parallel to map out the somatic alterations already present in the patient, which clearly has implications for the future of NGS-based diagnosis and workflows in the clinical laboratory.

By Achim von Leoprechting

Massively parallel sequencing has rapidly become a must-have tool of the trade in molecular biology and drug discovery research. In recent years, the cost of next-generation sequencing (NGS) has declined exponentially, while throughput, accuracy, and read lengths have soared, and multiple regulatory-compliant sequencing technologies have achieved commercial success.