The number of Chinese IVD companies exhibiting at the 2015 American Association for Clinical Chemistry Annual Meeting (AACC) & Clinical Lab Expo (CLE) was slightly down from last year, but the breadth of diagnostic products and innovations from China appears to be on the up. Hrishi Poola and Jon Chen discuss the moves China is making to become a generator of disruptive technologies and reports on the new products and the players emerging from this market

RainDance Technologies announced the official launch of the ThunderBolts cancer panel this week at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting in San Diego, where researchers demonstrated the system’s ability to genetically profile various types of tumors for as little as $100 per sample.

Qiagen has acquired privately held Intelligent Bio-Systems, a developer of next-generation sequencing (NGS) instruments aimed at the clinical research market. IBS’ technology, along with a newly expanded collaboration with bioinformatics provider SAP, is the cornerstone of a new NGS initiative at Qiagen.

Evidence of progress for molecular diagnostics and instrumentation, the mainstays of the personalized medicine toolkit, was considerable in 2010. Much of the activity centered on sequencing, although its general utility in clinical diagnostics has not yet been demonstrated and whether measurements of gene expression can form the basis for a plethora of molecular tests also remains an open question. In abbreviated form, we list some of the important dealmaking activities and trends of the year.