Two minutes with: Mirna Jarosz on updates and improvements in NGS

We caught up with Mirna Jarosz of Integrated DNA Technologies (IDT; IA, USA) to discuss the latest developments in their NGS technologies.

Please could you introduce yourself and your institution?

Hi, my name is Mirna Jarosz, I have been with IDT for 4.5 years, initially in research and development but recently in business development. Before that I was a long-time customer of IDT’s; I have worked at 10x Genomics and Foundation Medicine, both of which worked closely with IDT. Foundation Medicine worked with IDT to develop their initial target enrichment products that were used in diagnostics. The experience at Foundation is a good example of what IDT’s offerings in NGS have been to date; it’s always been quality, upmost performance and consistency and it has fit very well into that clinical diagnostics space, which is where IDT has a lot of customers.

Tell us about some of IDT’s recent NGS developments

What we are realising is that on the journey to developing diagnostics for patient care, there are research and discovery phases where you need to iterate a little more quickly. We want to be able to bring that high quality that we have had for larger scale customers, to the earlier stages of discovery and smaller projects. With that in mind, we’ve developed a product called NGS Discovery Pools. This product allows us to deliver results from a panel in 5 days as opposed to 2 or 3 weeks and at about a tenth of the cost that we have been able to for the more traditional and highly documented panels that we have had in the past.  We are really excited about how this can help the discovery phases, particularly in human genetics, health research and diagnostics.

Next-generation sequencing with Mirna Jarosz

In this BioTechniques behind the technique, we met Mirna Jarosz at AACR 2019 to discuss the impact NGS is having on cancer research, the best NGS technology innovations, the importance of collaborations and the future of NGS.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Another development that we are presenting, to expand on the quality and speed that is really important for customers, is introducing an off the shelf adaptor product. The challenge has been that all of our customers want different adaptor structures – and that has been our bread and butter – but  it also means that customers need to wait for IDT to make that for them and do custom quality control (QC) if that is needed. So now we will have an offering of 96 indexes with short adaptor structures that you can buy off the shelf that has already been QC’d, has already been checked for adaptor cross talk and has unique dual indexes. You don’t have to worry about index hopping. That is going to be a first in a series of products we are launching in that space to really help customers get what they need quickly and to get their projects going.