HudsonAlpha Discovery one of world’s largest sequencing service providers

HUNTSVILLE — Discovery Life Sciences, Huntsville’s biospecimen and biomarker specialists, has joined the ranks of the largest sequencing service providers in the world.

To meet the biopharmaceutical industry’s rising demands, HudsonAlpha Discovery, the company’s sequencing and bioinformatics division, has established a high-throughput long-read sequencing lab.

The unit is equipped with one of the world’s largest fleets of PacBio Sequel IIe instruments. PacBio is a California company that develops and manufactures systems for gene sequencing, automated liquid handling robotics, and optimized workflows.

PacBio’s HiFi long-read sequencing technology is being increasingly adopted for the biopharmaceutical industry, especially in the field of oncology research.

Discovery’s PacBio HiFi sequencing services provide a comprehensive view of genomes, transcriptomes, and epigenomes to provide insights to help advance precision medicine programs.

“PacBio’s Sequel IIe instrument is the most cutting-edge sequencing technology for generating highly accurate long reads,” said Dr. Tom Halsey, Discovery’s executive vice president of Genomics. “We’ve expanded adoption of their technology to become one of the largest PacBio service providers and optimized its application for the biopharmaceutical industry to support fast and affordable long-read sequencing projects of any size – including population-scale studies.”

Discovery has processed thousands of samples using PacBio’s Sequel IIe technology on research projects spanning disease characterization, RNA isoform analysis, trinucleotide repeat analysis, and population genomics.

Lara Toerien, vice president and general manager for the company’s Americas regions, said PacBio is excited to see Discovery’s unique and expansive offerings built on HiFi long-read sequencing technology flourish in their genomic services lab.

“Their service optimizations, integrated biospecimen solutions, and nucleic acid isolation services create a truly customer-centric service capability that we believe will help meet the growing demand for our HiFi sequencing data and accelerate new discoveries,” she said.