FREMONT, Calif. and LUXEMBOURG, March 29 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- WaferGen Biosystems, Inc. , a leading developer of state-of-the-art genetic analysis systems, and the Luxembourg Government today announced an agreement toward locating the company’s European headquarters in Luxembourg as part of WaferGen’s commercialization strategy for its SmartChip Real-Time PCR System. The agreement was signed Friday, March 26, 2010 at WaferGen’s new world headquarters facility in Fremont, Calif., by WaferGen and Mr. Jeannot Krecke, Minister of the Economy and Foreign Trade. Crown Prince Guillaume of Luxembourg and Mr. Krecke led a delegation to WaferGen to discuss mutual interests to advance personalized medicine.
The Luxembourg Government intends to apply instruments based on a recently passed law on research and innovation to facilitate the implementation of WaferGen’s European development project. The agreement is tentatively set to be finalized by the fourth quarter 2010.
“The location of our European operations in Luxembourg, which is centrally located in Europe and focused on the advancement of personalized medicine, would facilitate the sale and distribution of our SmartChip system throughout Europe,” said Alnoor Shivji, Chairman and CEO, WaferGen. “This is another important step in our commercialization strategy and combines with the receipt of a CE Mark for the SmartChip system and our collaboration at Ghent University in Belgium to further our international sales expansion.”
Personalized medicine is the use of information about a person’s genes, proteins, and environment to prevent, diagnose and treat disease. Sequencing of the human genome has brought about a new healthcare paradigm in which disease is understood at the molecular level, providing the potential for a patient to be diagnosed according to genetic information and treated with therapeutics designed to work on specific molecular targets.
This has led to the need for accurate, highly sensitive, comprehensive gene expression data by researchers, clinicians and pharmaceutical companies. Today’s analytical tools to comprehend differences in genes provide incomplete data or are too expensive to be practical in the development process. The gene analysis of cancer, for example, has proved much more complex than originally anticipated.
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WaferGen Biosystems, Inc.
