Omixon Upgrade Holotype HLA to 7 Loci - Omixon

Omixon announce that Holotype HLA™, a HLA genotyping product that is NGS-based and provides the most complete and accurate characterization of the HLA genes, will be extended from five to seven HLA loci. Launched with five loci (HLA-A, B, C, DRB1, DQB1) in October 2014, and currently available under an Early Access Program, Holotype HLA will now include additional Class II loci, DPB1 and DQA1. Omixon have already begun shipping the 7-locus kits to labs that have pre-ordered.

“The overwhelming feedback from those eager to adopt Holotype HLA at our EAP launch at ASHI in Denver was that seven loci would provide a more complete HLA genotyping result for both Solid Organ and Bone Marrow workflows allowing labs to work towards just one workflow”, says Tim Hague, CEO of Omixon. “As the clinical data emerged from the Monos lab that these loci were ready to be commercialized, we committed to bring DPB1 and DQA1 to market in Holotype HLA as quickly as possible.”

Another key piece of feedback from the market was that the pooling of HLA loci, which allows indexing at the level of the sample, was definitely the way forward for Holotype HLA. The Alpha Study data presented at ASHI by Deb Ferriola and the additional evidence from the 1000+ clinical samples analyzed at CHOP during 2014, in which 100% concordance has been observed between per-sample indexing and per-locus indexing strategies, has convinced most labs in the Early Access Program and other early evaluators that the more cost-effective per-sample indexing is suitable for clinical HLA genotyping.

“Having repeatedly demonstrated locus-level concordance between the per-sample indexing and the per-locus indexing strategy both in the Monos Lab at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and among the first Early Access Program participants, Omixon will offer the new 7-locus kits only in the per-sample indexing configuration, Holotype HLA X2”, says Dr. Peter Meintjes, Director of US Operations at Omixon. The new configurations, termed X2-24/7 and X2-96/7 will contain 24 and 96 samples respectively at seven loci. Labs adopting these new configurations and wishing to use some fraction of 24 or 96 samples will be able to comfortably divide the kits into thirds, catering for labs of every throughput – from 8 to 96 samples per MiSeq run.

Omixon recently closed its Early Access Program to new participants on December 31st 2014, and additional announcements on those participants and their progress are expected until the expected conclusion of the EAP in May 2015. The results from individual labs and collated results are expected to be published and presented at the ASHI meeting in Savannah, Georgia in September 2015.