NuProbe Announces Strategic Collaboration with Weigao Group and Partnerships with Four Global Industry Leaders Within Six Months

In China’s genetic testing and diagnostics sector, upstream technologies have long been monopolized by global sequencing giants such as Illumina and Qiagen, leaving domestic gene sequencing companies with weak bargaining power and even dependent on upstream technology supplies. Against this backdrop, CarrierGene Biotech has taken a contrary approach, repeatedly licensing its patented technologies to leading international sequencing companies and earning licensing fees. It has thus become one of the few molecular diagnostics companies in the industry that possesses core upstream technologies and enjoys international recognition.

In mid-June, CarrierGene Biotech announced a strategic partnership with Weigao Group to develop a liquid biopsy panel for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) based on BDA technology. This marks the company’s fourth collaboration this year with leading healthcare enterprises. Previously, CarrierGene Biotech had successively established strategic partnerships with global sequencing giants Illumina, Oxford Nanopore Technologies (hereinafter referred to as “Oxford Nanopore”), and Qiagen, emerging as a notable highlight in the sequencing industry this year.

Why have global sequencing giants such as Illumina and Qiagen chosen CarrierGene Biotech? What makes this company a highly sought-after partner in the sequencing industry? VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) analyzes CarrierGene Biotech’s achievements over the past six months to highlight its core competitiveness.

On June 15, CarrierGene Biotech and Weigao Group announced a strategic partnership. The two parties will leverage CarrierGene’s patented Blocker Displacement Amplification (BDA) technology to develop a liquid biopsy product for non-small cell lung cancer based on a desktop NGS platform, with plans to submit a registration application to the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) in the future.

Compared to traditional NGS methods, the liquid biopsy panel developed based on BDA technology is a highly unique product in the current market, well-suited for integration with desktop NGS platforms. It features high sensitivity, outstanding cost-effectiveness, rapid detection, and broad accessibility. Both parties will work together to promote NGS-based tumor liquid biopsy products that better meet China’s clinical needs into primary healthcare hospital networks, thereby benefiting a wide range of patients.

“Our mission is to provide localized, real-time NGS-based liquid biopsy clinical solutions for cancer patients across China’s extensive network of secondary and tertiary hospitals.”Chen Lin, Secretary of the Party Committee of Weigao Holdings and Vice Chairman of Weigao Group“CarrierGene possesses globally leading innovative technologies and is currently the only company that has mastered the technology to develop 0.1% sensitivity at an extremely low cost on desktop NGS platforms, making it our ideal partner. Meanwhile, CarrierGene has extensive commercial experience in China’s clinical genetic testing market, providing us with more opportunities for in-depth collaboration in the future.”

“Weigao Group is a leading domestic medical device and pharmaceutical enterprise with extensive channel resources. We are delighted to partner with Weigao Group to develop next-generation tumor liquid biopsy products based on BDA technology, thereby benefiting a broad patient population in China amid the trend toward tiered diagnosis and treatment.”CarrierGeneCEO Chai Yingshuangstated, “Currently, due to various reasons, tumor NGS testing in China has not achieved widespread adoption across hospitals at all levels, unlike PCR technology, resulting in a significant gap between supply and demand. We believe that through our strategic partnership with Weigao Group, we can provide clinicians and patients with unprecedentedly affordable tumor liquid biopsy products, thereby contributing to the goal of ‘precision medicine for all.’”

The collaboration with Weigao Group marks CarrierGene’s most recent major corporate move, following three prior strategic partnerships with international sequencing giants.

Three months earlier, on March 17, CarrierGene Biotech announced a strategic collaboration with Qiagen to develop next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based diagnostic technologies for non-invasive liquid biopsy in cancer.

Under the collaboration agreement, CarrierGene Biotech and Qiagen will develop new products based on amplicon enrichment and sequencing technologies. These products incorporate CarrierGene’s proprietary BDA technology and Qiagen’s SPE (Single Primer Extension) technology. The new offerings will facilitate non-invasive detection of cancer genomes and enable accurate, cost-effective analysis of DNA target molecules with extremely low mutation rates. The CarrierGene and Qiagen teams will initially develop research-use-only (RUO) products for clinical oncology researchers. The tumor panels under development by both companies, which are based on next-generation sequencing (NGS) and liquid biopsy, will achieve highly sensitive limits of detection in a more economical manner—a feat unattainable by current alternative technologies. In the future, CarrierGene and Qiagen will further explore new strategic cooperation opportunities and develop additional commercial products.

“Good wine needs no bush.” Core technologies with competitive advantages naturally attract strong international cooperation, a principle exemplified by CarrierGene Biotech. On February 26, CarrierGene Biotech announced a strategic partnership with its second international giant in gene sequencing, signing a patent licensing agreement with Oxford Nanopore Technologies to facilitate higher-sensitivity detection of cancer gene variants for the latter. Under this agreement, Oxford Nanopore Technologies has obtained a global license for CarrierGene’s BDA technology at an undisclosed fee.

CarrierGene’s BDA technology enriches low-frequency mutation sites, enabling Oxford Nanopore’s real-time, rapid-turnaround, scalable sequencing platform—applicable to DNA or RNA of any length—to detect and quantify somatic mutations with allele frequencies below 5% at higher sensitivity. By amplifying and enriching low-frequency genetic variants present at levels as low as 0.1% in samples by 500-fold, the technology improves the signal-to-noise ratio, helping Oxford Nanopore overcome its longstanding error-rate limitations and thereby enhancing the detection capabilities of the Nanopore sequencing platform in fields such as cancer liquid biopsy.

CarrierGene’s other latest patented technology, LDA, can effectively ligate short DNA fragments, increasing the effective sequencing throughput of Oxford Nanopore by 10-fold and enabling applications in tumor detection. The combination of LDA and BDA technologies not only empowers Oxford Nanopore to expand into liquid biopsy application scenarios but also adds powerful tools for rapid detection and long-read sequencing to the cancer liquid biopsy market. This collaboration will facilitate the application of Oxford Nanopore sequencing technology in broader fields such as cancer. By using compact, user-friendly devices like MinION and Flongle, targeted sequencing can be employed to identify single nucleotide variants (SNVs) and structural variants (SVs) while simultaneously performing methylation analysis.

Over the past six months of collaboration, the first partner for CarrierGene Biotech has been the international sequencing giant Illumina. At the end of 2019, CarrierGene Biotech and Illumina announced the formal signing of a partnership agreement, under which both parties will engage in in-depth strategic cooperation in the field of clinical next-generation sequencing (NGS) testing for infertility and other genetic disorders. As part of this collaborative initiative, CarrierGene Biotech will develop clinical molecular diagnostic kits based on Illumina’s NGS technology platform, including nucleic acid extraction, library preparation, and data analysis software, and plans to seek regulatory approval from the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA). Meanwhile, Illumina will provide next-generation sequencing instruments and related reagents. In addition, both parties plan to further cooperate in promotion across other areas.

While domestic sequencing companies were still paying high licensing fees to obtain upstream technology licenses, CarrierGene Biotech had already completed multiple technology license-out deals. Blocker Displacement Amplification (BDA), one of CarrierGene Biotech’s core technologies, has been highly favored by leading healthcare enterprises in numerous strategic collaborations.

BDA technology effectively reduces wild-type amplification efficiency and amplifies low-frequency mutation signals through innovative thermodynamic design during PCR amplification cycles. This significantly decreases the volume of data wasted on wild-type sequences in platforms such as NGS, reducing the required sequencing data volume by more than 40-fold. Consequently, it substantially lowers the cost of clinical genetic testing while greatly enhancing detection sensitivity. This technology is widely applicable in scenarios such as tumor liquid biopsy, post-transplant rejection monitoring, and microbial infection detection, with excellent performance demonstrated in clinical laboratories in both China and the United States.

The uniqueness of BDA technology lies in its ability to empower small-scale NGS sequencers (including desktop instruments such as MiSeq and PGM) to perform assays that were previously feasible only on large, industrial-grade sequencing platforms like NovaSeq (e.g., large-panel genetic testing and tumor liquid biopsy). The main features of its products are:1）Suitable for miniaturized NGS instruments;2）Achieve a sensitivity of one part per thousand;3）Complete the experimental protocol in 2 days;4）Significantly reducing costs can effectively assist a wide range of hospitals and small-to-medium-sized laboratories in conducting in-house clinical NGS testing, thereby substantially improving the conversion rate and market penetration of NGS.

Furthermore, by integrating BDA with Sanger sequencing, the sensitivity of Sanger-based detection can be improved from the previous 10% to 0.1%, enabling the identification of variants that are difficult to detect and interpret using conventional NGS technologies. This advancement allows Sanger sequencing to be utilized for tumor liquid biopsy. With thousands of Sanger sequencers installed in hospitals across China, this low-cost tumor liquid biopsy technology undoubtedly holds significant social and economic value.

It is worth noting that BDA technology is currently the only technique capable of enriching mutant alleles through multiplex detection methods. It is also the only selective enrichment technology that has been practically validated on the Nanopore third-generation sequencing platform. As a disruptive foundational technology, it can be widely applied across various molecular diagnostic platforms, including PCR, first-generation capillary sequencing, second-generation high-throughput sequencing, third-generation single-molecule sequencing, and nucleic acid mass spectrometry.

In addition to BDA technology, CarrierGene Biotech also hasRapidCap NGS Targeted Capture Enrichment、Toehold Technology、High-Efficiency Unique Molecular Identifier (UMI) TechnologyandLatest Patented Technology: LDAand numerous other independently developed core technologies, leveraging them to continuously develop new products and forge partnerships.

Meanwhile, owing to its high-quality experimental techniques, CarrierGene Biotech was certified by Agilent, the global leader in NGS probe capture technology, as a Certified Service Provider (CSP) for targeted capture high-throughput sequencing in 2017. It became the 19th CSP-certified enterprise worldwide and one of only two such companies in China (the other being BGI Genomics).

In addition to its core competencies in technological patents, the CarrierGene team comprises senior scientists from Harvard University and Rice University, as well as seasoned executives from leading genomics companies such as Illumina, Thermo Fisher Scientific, WuXi AppTec, and Da An Gene. The team possesses an average of over 15 years of experience across various sectors of the genomics field, including R&D, laboratory operations, marketing, regulatory affairs, and sales. The company has established R&D laboratories in Houston, USA, and Shanghai, China, and operates GMP-compliant production facilities in Suzhou.

In China’s reproductive health sector, the number of patients with infertility is continuously rising. Official reports indicate that 40–50 million people are affected, with a prevalence rate of 12–15%, and 30% of cases are genetically related. In practice, many patients remain undiagnosed despite seeking medical care at multiple institutions, which delays family planning and undermines marital stability. CarrierGene Biotech is a pioneer and leading company in China’s blue-ocean market for genetic testing in infertility. By leveraging core technologies such as internationally leading diagnostic algorithms, authenticating true versus false genetic signals, and identifying chimerism, the company has established strong competitive barriers. It has also built extensive collaborations and connections with major hospitals across China. CarrierGene Biotech was the first in China to offer genetic testing for prevalent reproductive health conditions with unclear clinical causes, including male infertility, female infertility, and recurrent pregnancy loss. This approach reduces the diagnostic timeline for genetically related infertility from months or years to just days, helping patients quickly identify the underlying causes so they can choose appropriate subsequent treatments, such as surgery or medication.

Furthermore, CarrierGene Biotech is simultaneously conducting business and partnerships in the United States, the Asia-Pacific region, and other markets by leveraging its various platform technologies. The company will further enhance operational efficiency and strengthen its core competitiveness through international operations.