If you are interested in hearing more about our approach and would like to arrange a meeting please visit us on booth number 3115 during the conference or contact us either directly or via the conference partnering system.

For further details of the conference please visit http://convention.bio.org/

Schafer brings deep experience in research, “big pharma” management and building new businesses. He is Adjunct Professor of Innovation at Imperial College London Business School and was previously the Wellcome Trust’s Director of Science Funding. Before that he served as Global Vice-President of Technology Development at GlaxoSmithKline and co-founded Hexagen, a functional genomics company and subsequently acquired by Incyte. He will continue to serve on a number of research and venture capital advisory boards.

“We have validated our technology platforms and built important collaborations with world class clinical research groups and now look forward to the next phase in our development with Alan at the helm,” said Sam Eletr, a co-founder and Chairman of Population Genetics. “Our aim is to provide an efficient route for population-scale genetic analysis and biomarker discovery for application in medicine and agriculture”.

Commenting on his appointment as CEO Schafer added: “I am devoted to excellence in research and its application to improve health and human welfare and am pleased to be joining Population Genetics where the company’s talented staff, solid investor group, established capabilities and intellectual property portfolio will allow us to accelerate the application of genetics to improve human health by providing actionable information, not just sequencing data”.

Please address all inquiries to:

Dr. Frank Massam,
Chief Commercial Officer,
Population Genetics
+44 (0)1223 497359
frank.massam@populationgenetics.com

Dr Clare Jones
Account Director
Alto Marketing
+44(0)1489 557672
clarej@alto-marketing.com

Population Genetics has closed a $5.7 million Series B financing round intended to enable completion of several ongoing biological validations of the Company’s technology, setting the stage for a future major financing aimed at making that technology broadly available. New investor, Syngenta Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Syngenta, joins the Company’s existing shareholders: Compass Genetics Investors LLC, the Wellcome Trust, Auriga Partners and Beringea LLP.

The Company also announced today a research agreement with Syngenta Biotechnology, Inc., aimed initially at validating the use of its technology in plant breeding studies.

The Population Genetics proprietary technology evolved from ideas proposed by its co-founder, Nobel Laureate Sydney Brenner. It exploits the power and efficiency of next generation DNA sequencers which it enables to interrogate simultaneously for sequence information, sets of suspected candidate genes in hundreds, if not thousands of genomes. It is thus expected to facilitate greatly both the identification and statistical validation of sequence variants associated with phenotypic traits, be they disease pre-dispositions or drug responses in medicine, or even, soon, important agronomic plant traits. Population Genetics has already initiated a number of studies aimed at validating its technology.

One, a collaborative study with researchers at Cardiff University, aims to analyze a number of suspected genes in both a population of 1,000 patients suffering late-onset Alzheimer’s disease and a population of 500 age-matched controls. Funded by a Translation Award from the Wellcome Trust, the study has also been augmented with additional funding from the Medical Research Council (MRC) of the UK. Another study with Quintiles, follows a genome-wide association study supported by a large pharmaceutical company in a population of renal cancer patients. Yet other collaborative studies, with several oncologists in different parts of the UK, investigate the efficacy of chemotherapy protocols in large populations of patients affected by breast cancer or childhood acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.

“We are gratified,” said Sam Eletr, a co-founder of the Company and its Chairman of the Board, “that these yet unpublished studies helped highlight, to a sophisticated research organization such as Syngenta, the ease with which our proprietary process can readily discover or validate genomic markers, across very large populations of genomes, using only just one (or just a few) DNA sequencing run(s). Once completed, we expect these studies to convince many researchers, whether academic or corporate, in health or in agriculture, that they can tackle, together with our Company, population studies that only very large laboratories, well-equipped with very large numbers of very expensive sequencers, can now undertake.”

“We are pleased to be able to work with Population Genetics to extend the use of their novel technology for human diagnostics into the agricultural field,” said Michiel van Lookeren Campagne, Head of Biotechnology for Syngenta. “This technology will allow us to simultaneously characterize the molecular basis for complex multigenic traits across very large number of lines in one test tube. This will increase the rate of innovation in our breeding programs while reducing the cost and complexity of the analysis.”

Please address all inquiries to either:
Dr Sam Eletr, +44 (0) 7766 442334
sam.eletr@populationgenetics.com or

Dr Mark Treherne, +44 (0) 1223 497357
mark.treherne@populationgenetics.com

Notes to Editors:
About Population Genetics
Founded on 2nd April, 2005, Population Genetics Technologies Limited is located at the Babraham Research Campus, near Cambridge, UK, and has developed a novel approach for the rapid identification of rare genetic variants in large populations of interest. This approach represents a significant advancement in the identification and utilisation of genetic biomarkers, which are fundamental to the development of personalised medicine.

In 2005, Population Genetics received a Strategic Translation Award from the Wellcome Trust to support development of its proprietary technology. The genetic association with Alzheimer’s disease study is supported by an additional Translation Award from the Wellcome Trust. The latest $5.7 million Series B financing adds to existing venture capital investment of over £3.8 million.

About the Wellcome Trust
The Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving extraordinary improvements in human and animal health. It supports the brightest minds in biomedical research and the medical humanities. The Trust’s breadth of support includes public engagement, education and the application of research to improve health. It is independent of both political and commercial interests.

www.wellcome.ac.uk

PopGenTech has developed proprietary technologies that will reduce dramatically the costs of performing large-scale population studies on Next Generation Sequencing platforms while allowing the detection and characterization of rare allelic variations in disease phenotypes. The company believes that its technologies, when broadly adopted, will have a significant impact on discovery, biomarker identification, diagnostic and personalized medicine workflows. PopGenTech will screen AD patients for specific genes that were identified in recent large-scale genome-wide analyses of common genetic variants by Cardiff University and its fellow collaborators. The new study will use DNA samples, carefully chosen by scientists led by Professor Julie Williams at the Cardiff University MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics, from populations of AD patients. The work will focus on genetic regions that involve pathways believed to be involved in AD pathology. The results are expected to validate the PopGenTech methods while providing Cardiff University with information on previously undetected rare genetic variants. Such rare variants could not only suggest possible targets for the development of future therapies but they can also provide additional objective markers for diagnosing predisposition and, when appropriate, guiding treatment strategies.

Commenting on the award Mel Kronick, President and CEO of PopGenTech said, ”We are grateful to the Wellcome Trust for this award and excited about working with Professor Julie Williams and her team to elucidate the involvement of rare allelic variants in the development and progression of this important disease. We are very happy to be applying our proprietary technologies to studies that, until now, have been virtually impossible in most labs for reasons of time and cost. Following as it does a recent U.K. National Health Service award for the study of breast cancer, this study further illustrates the benefit that our approaches can bring to clinical and pharmacogenetic research programmes.” Ted Bianco, Director of Technology Transfer at the Wellcome Trust, added: “PopGenTech’s technologies have the potential to greatly reduce the cost of large-scale genetic studies, making them a more feasible option for more laboratories. We are pleased to support this project and we hope that it will help to accelerate discovery in this important area of research, to ultimately improve our understanding of the genetics of disease.”

Contact
Frank Massam, PhD
Chief Commercial Officer
Population Genetics technologies Ltd
Babraham Research Campus
Cambridgeshire
UK, CB22 3AT

Phone: +44 (0)1223 497 359
Email: frank.massam@popgentech.com

PGT’s proprietary technology greatly reduces costs, time for large-scale genomic testing; increases probability of associating genomic variations with clinical outcomes.

Commercial collaboration part of Quintiles’ ongoing strategy to help biopharma industry navigate complexity of the New Health landscape.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. and CAMBRIDGE, U.K. – May 16,2011– Quintiles, the world’s leading biopharmaceutical services company, and Population Genetics Technologies Ltd.(PGT), creator of innovative solutions to reduce the costs and complexity of large-scale genomic testing and enable correlations with clinical outcomes, today announced a commercial collaboration to bring genomic testing into mainstream drug development in order to produce safer, more effective medicines.

Through the non-exclusive collaboration, Quintiles and PGT will jointly identify opportunities to apply the power of large-scale genomic analyses –using samples from hundreds to thousands of individuals –to test clinical hypotheses and correlate biomarkers of disease prognosis and drug responsiveness. This approach enables the rapid identification of rare and common alleles that collectively account for significant variation in treatment responses.

Such large-scale testing has been prohibitively expensive, as sample preparation, sequencing and analysis have to be undertaken separately for each sample. PGT’s innovative technology can process many hundreds of genomes simultaneously, in a single sequencing assay, while still retaining the ability to identify each individual genome during post-sequencing data analysis.

“PGT’s technology combined with Quintiles global presence can bring the benefits of large-scale sequencing and analysis to virtually all biopharmaceutical companies,” said M. King Jolly, Pharm.D., Senior Vice President of Quintiles Innovation. “The combination of Quintiles and PGT’s capabilities can, we believe, increase the probability of success in clinical trials, reduce trial enrollment required to achieve statistical significance, and diminish the costs and/or time required to bring a product to market –all while improving product differentiation.”

PGT Chief Commercial Officer Frank Massam, Ph.D., said: “Our first project with Quintiles is a renal cancer clinical trial to identify genetic markers predictive of both adverse events and efficacy, but our workflows are appropriate to all therapeutic areas. We are currently running programs in breast cancer, leukemia and Alzheimer’s disease. We are proud to be associated with the work that Quintiles is leading to deliver real patient benefits from cutting-edge genomic research.”

Both companies will seek other opportunities to demonstrate to biopharma companies, payers, academic researchers and patient groups the value of this approach to improving human health.

This collaboration further enhances Quintiles’ established capabilities in genomics- and biomarker- based discovery and research. Within Quintiles’ Translational R&D Oncology group, innovative genomic technologies are being used to drive novel biomarker discovery and support more intelligent, data-driven clinical trial design and implementation for its customers.

About Population Genetics Technologies
Co-founded by Nobel Laureate Dr. Sydney Brenner, Population Genetics Technologies creates products that accelerate large-scale population studies, through the simultaneous analysis of multiple individual genomes. Our proprietary technology replaces initial sample preparation steps for next-generation DNA sequencing, overcoming cost barriers and practical constraints that limit discovery. For more information, please visit www.popgentech.com.

About Quintiles
Quintiles is the only fully integrated biopharmaceutical services company offering clinical, commercial, consulting and capital solutions worldwide. The Quintiles network of more than 20,000 engaged professionals in 60 countries around the globe works with an unwavering commitment to patients, safety and ethics. Quintiles helps biopharmaceutical companies navigate risk and seize opportunities in an environment where change is constant. For more information, please visit www.quintiles.com.

Quintiles
Mari Mansfield
Media Relations
(mari.manfield@quintiles.com)
+1 919 998 2639
Greg Connors
Investor Relations
(invest@quintiles.com)
+1 919 998-2000

Population Genetics Technologies
Frank Massam
Chief Commercial Officer
(frank.massam@popgentech.com)
+44 1223 497359

Population Genetics technologies (PGT) Ltd, a privately owned company based in Cambridge, UK today announced that it has been awarded a grant from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) as part of the Institute’s Invention for Innovation (i4i) Programme.

The i4i Programme provides investment in, and improved identification of, promising healthcare technologies in order to accelerate the development of new healthcare products for the 21st century. The i4i programme funds translational research, extending between basic research and pre-clinical trials, or health technology assessments.

PGT has developed proprietary technologies that will both dramatically reduce the costs of performing large-scale population studies on Next Generation Sequencing platforms and also allow the detection and characterization of rare allelic variations in disease phenotypes. The company believes that these technologies will have a significant impact on discovery, biomarker identification, diagnostic and personalized medicine workflows.

The NIHR funded study will use PGT’s technologies to assess the link between rare sequence variants in 1000 patient genomes and response to a range of chemotherapeutic agents.

Commenting on the award Mel Kronick, President and CEO of PGT said, ”We are extremely pleased to have been awarded this grant which recognizes the potential of our technologies to have a major clinical impact over the coming years. PGT intends to use this study to demonstrate the value of its approach in identifying, before treatment, which patients in any given population are likely to respond favourably or adversely to a given drug regime. PGT’s technologies also have potential applications in determining, with high confidence, predisposition to many disease states.”

Contact

Frank Massam, PhD
Chief Commercial Officer
Population Genetics technologies Ltd
Babraham Research Campus
Cambridgeshire
UK, CB22 3AT

Phone: +44 (0)1223 497 359
Email:   frank.massam@populationgenetics.com