Omixon today announce that their flagship Holotype HLA assay and software solution for HLA typing by Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) has been selected as the HLA typing solution of choice by the Etablissement Français du Sang (the French National Blood Service, EFS). Omixon won a two-year competitive tender worth €6.5m, with an option to extend by an additional two years.
EFS is the leading supplier of cell and tissue therapy products to health-care establishments in France, enabling solid organ and haematopoietic stem-cell transplants to be performed on patients, and performing up to 70,000 HLA genotyping tests per year, with up to 11 HLA loci per test. Working together, Omixon and EFS will deploy HLA typing by NGS in 8 labs across 7 regions during 2016.
“Omixon are delighted to have been selected for such a large and prestigious contract, in the face of some stiff competition,” said Tim Hague, CEO of Omixon, “It’s a great credit to our entire team that we have produced such a high quality product that will be adopted improve treatment outcomes for transplant patients in France.”
The worldwide Early Access Program was formally closed on June 18, 2015, and participants have provided the sequence data and the reference typings to Omixon for additional analysis. Among the participants in the US were Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, ARUP Laboratories, American Red Cross in Dedham, and Yale University; while the Hellenic Cord Blood Bank in Athens, the Danish Blood Services, DKMS and the University of Geneva are among the many European institutions that participated. Dr. Peter Meintjes says, “Completing a worldwide Early Access Program of this magnitude with a technology that is brand new to the HLA community has been exhilarating. The excitement from our customers at generating their first data, then seeing almost no ambiguity in the results and visualizing whole gene consensus sequences has been a significant motivator towards adoption.”
“To support the EFS labs and the huge interest in Holotype HLA,” Tim Hague continues, “Omixon has scaled its business with additional hires in the US and Europe and has expanded its distributor network across the EMEA and Asia-Pacific territories to support its rapidly diversifying product line, and is poised for even more growth in 2016.”
