WaferGen Bio-Systems Surges After Positive Results From Single Cell Study

WaferGen Bio-systems, Inc.'s WGBS stock was up more than 23 percent on Wednesday after the company announced positive results of a Single Cell study.

According to the company’s press release, the study aims at “validating the utility of its SmartChip^TM technology for isolating and studying single cells via Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS).”

The investigation was conducted in collaboration with the Broad Institute. The findings and results will be presented at the 2015 Advances in Genome Biology & Technology (AGBT) meeting to be held February 25-28 in Marco Island, Florida.

Dr. Chad Nusbaum, Scientific Director at Broad Technology Labs, and Co-Director of Genome Sequencing and Analysis at the Broad Institute said that they are “pleased with the single cell transcrip to me analysis results obtained with the SmartChip™ platform in this initial study.”

Ivan Trifunovich, President and Chief Executive Officer of WaferGen added: “Single cell analysis has the potential to play a significant role in the development of precision medicine, which is transforming healthcare (…) We expect our SmartChip^TM technology will be able to yield a 50-fold increase in the production of single cells per chip at a fraction of the current per cell cost. We continue to expect to launch an Early Access Program for this technology during the second quarter of 2015.”