Thermo Fisher Covers A Lot Of Ground, Including Pet DNA

At $24 billion in annual revenue, growth has to come from somewhere. Just like any other large conglomerate, Thermo Fisher is constantly testing new business lines to sustain overall product and service portfolio growth into the future. Recently, the company announced its advancements in genotype by sequencing (GBS) solutions for canines and felines. Yes, that is correct, dog and cat owners will soon be able to determine with a fairly significant degree of accuracy their pet’s lineage and if it is predisposed to certain diseases.

Undeniably, the pet market is huge and dog and cat owners love their pets like children, so why not better understand their genetic makeup?

“Our new AgriSeq GBS panels for dogs and cats will enable the industry to adopt and switch to highly informative SNP-based genotyping from current STR-based parentage testing,” Martin Guillet, global head and general manager for AgriBusiness at Thermo Fisher Scientific. “Customers will be able to provide more detailed, critical information at comparable costs and effort which will pave the way for our advancement in targeted GBS testing and screening of companion animals.”

The new panels provide a unique value proposition by offering a lower cost yet highly multiplexed and scalable targeted genetic screening tool for companion animals. The panels are intuitive to use and achieve high call rates with reproducible genotyping results. And the panel results can be obtained in two to three days.

Notably, the International Society of Animal Genetics (ISAG) has been voicing their perspective over the last five years on the need to review the performance of the targeted GBS markers in more correctly identifying possible parentage and traits for companion animals.

The CFO of VHLGenetics Maarten de Groot commented, “In our portfolio, AgriSeq targeted GBS really closed the gap between single plex genotyping and arrays, allowing for flexible panels in the range of 100 to 5,000 genetic markers, combining parentage verification and genetic variants,” further adding “The efficient AgriSeq workflow aids in our scientific and operational effectiveness.”

Thermo Fisher currently has a market capitalization of $114 billion and offers science related products and services through four premier brands – Thermo Scientific, Applied Biosystems, Invitrogen, Fisher Scientific and Unity Lab Services.