PacBio Announces HiFi Prep Kit 96 and HiFi Plex Prep Kit 96 for Long-Read Sequencing Applications at Scale

PacBio (NASDAQ: PACB), announced two new high throughput library preparation kits and workflows optimized for its Revio sequencing system. With these kits, PacBio takes another leap forward in the long-read market by offering customers automated, scalable, and high-performance library preparation solutions with a 40 percent reduction in costs and a 60 percent decrease in workflow time. In addition, with the HiFi Plex Prep Kit 96 now including 384 validated barcode adapters, customers will have the groundbreaking ability to run 1,536 samples in a single Revio run.

"With the launch of these new kits, PacBio will bring our customers scale, savings, and speed never before possible on Revio," said Jeff Eidel, Chief Commercial Officer at PacBio. "We are always in conversation with our customers about future innovation and these kits were built in response to several large projects recently won on Revio with customers wanting to scale to thousands if not tens of thousands of samples per year. We are thrilled with the prospect of providing customers with meaningful options for scale that allow them to explore emerging applications."

Engineered for efficiency, the new HiFi Prep Kit 96 and HiFi Plex Prep Kit 96 are designed to allow users the ability to automate long-read sequencing workflow steps and streamline the process of preparing, pooling, and loading samples. These capabilities help eliminate bottlenecks related to cost, time, and labor, making them one of the most cost-effective high-throughput long-read library preparation solutions on the market.

For microbial, metagenome, and low-pass whole genome sequencing customers, these new offerings will allow them to unlock large projects with organizations of varying budget requirements. The new kit configurations will also provide customers with a 4-fold reduction in waste and packaging as compared to the previous generation of PacBio library preparation kits.

"The new automated workflow is providing high quality HiFi-GS libraries in our pilot experiments on human blood DNAs," said Tomi Pastinen, M.D., Ph.D. Dee Lyons/Missouri Endowed Chair in Pediatric Genomic Medicine and Director for the Center for Pediatric Genomic Medicine at Children’s Mercy Kansas City. "We are excited to implement the workflow in clinical HiFi-GS research to reduce turnaround time and increase efficiency, respectively."

"The output of Revio opened up the possibility of scaling the use of long-read sequencing beyond reference genomes into genotyping," said Josh Clevenger, Ph.D., Faculty Investigator at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. "The speed and ease of use of the HiFi Prep Kit 96 and HiFi Plex Prep Kit 96 has made it possible for us to use long-read sequencing as a high-throughput genotyping tool."

The new HiFi library prep kits are expected to be available for purchase in the first quarter of 2024, with delivery planned early in the second quarter of 2024. Automated protocols will first be available on the Hamilton NGS STAR system, with qualified protocols on additional PacBio Compatible automation platform partners being added in the future. Kits contain enough volume for customers to develop their own automated methods.