NuGEN Technologies, a rapidly-growing, privately-held company providing innovative products and systems for the preparation of biologic samples for targeted genomic analysis, has launched a sample preparation product that allows NGS detection of multiple changes in more than 500 individual genes implicated in cancer.

The reagent kit, based on NuGEN’s Single Primer Enrichment Technology (SPET), is called the Ovation Cancer Panel 2.0 Target Enrichment System. The new kit updates NuGEN’s well-established Ovation Cancer Panel Target Enrichment System both by enriching for an improved and larger selection of cancer-related genes, and by enabling the detection of gene level copy-number variations (CNV) in addition to SNPs, mutations and indels, in a single workflow. It can be used with either fresh or FFPE tissue sections to deliver sensitive and reproducible targeted genomic analysis.

The method can also be rapidly customized to provide target enrichment kits for any gene sets defined by the researcher within a target size range that may include thousands of genes or just a few.

The new product is the latest release in the company’s drive to offer tools for targeted resequencing that provide basic and clinical researchers with a holistic view of the underlying molecular biology of disease.

“We’re excited by this latest product introduction,” said NuGEN chief executive officer Elizabeth Hutt.

“The Ovation Cancer Panel 2.0 Target Enrichment System enables a more comprehensive picture of the biology of a particular sample. And by making it possible to analyse mutations, SNPs and gene copy number changes in a single assay, the new system will save researchers time and money and allow more efficient use of samples.

Typically, to analyse single nucleotide mutations and copy number changes in a sample, researchers have had to employ completely different analysis platforms. NuGEN’s new method allows simultaneous targeted analysis of both types of changes, from a single sample preparation, on a choice of Illumina NGS systems.

According to Robert P. Sebra, Ph.D., director of technology development at the Icahn Institute and department of genetics and genomic sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, “The underlying cause of cancer involves critical alterations in the genome. These alterations may include point mutations, changes in gene copy number, combinations of these, and other genomic changes. Having a common NGS workflow to simultaneously detect multiple types of variations would be invaluable because it would conserve precious patient samples and offers the ability to reproduce or validate results.”

Hutt added, “For cancer research, combined mutation and CNV analysis is a valuable complement to NuGEN’s recently released Ovation Fusion Panel Target Enrichment System, which also uses SPET to detect both known and unknown gene fusions in all exons of a 500 gene panel.”