NEW YORK – Ultima Genomics and Exact Sciences said on Tuesday that they have struck a long-term supply agreement for Ultima’s next-generation sequencing technology.
In conjunction with the deal, Exact Sciences also became an investor in Ultima as part of a Series E financing and joined the firm's ongoing early-access program for its UG 100 high-throughput sequencing platform.
Financial terms of the agreement and the size of the investment were not disclosed.
Under the supply agreement, Ultima will provide Exact Sciences with access to its NGS products. In addition, the companies plan to develop one or more of Exact Sciences’ cancer diagnostic tests using Ultima’s sequencing technology.
“Ultima’s mission to drive down the cost of sequencing and increase the use of genomic information supports our goal to provide accurate and affordable testing options across the cancer continuum,” Exact Sciences CEO and Chairman Kevin Conroy said in a statement. “This is particularly important for applications like cancer screening, minimal residual disease, and recurrence monitoring, which could lead to millions of tests per year.”
After emerging from stealth mode in late May, Newark, California-based Ultima, with its promise of a $100 genome, garnered sizable attention at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) annual meeting earlier this month.
The company also recently forged a partnership with Nvidia to embed that firm’s graphics processing units into its UG 100 sequencing instruments, and it entered a collaboration with Olink to enable the Olink Explore proteomics platform to read out results on the UG 100.