The first collaboration is with Atila BioSystems, which the company says will provide noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) solutions to Qiagen's dPCR franchise.

The second collaboration involves a co-exclusive licensing and co-marketing agreement with German life sciences startup Actome to extend Qiacuity's reach beyond genomics into proteomics, enabling the quantification of proteins, as well as the analyses of interactions between different proteins and between proteins and target genes.

Qiacuity disperses a sample over thousands of tiny nanoplate partitions and then simultaneously reads the reaction in each one. This enables it to quantify trace signals from DNA and RNA and proteins as it tests for viruses, bacteria, or other disorders, including rare cancer mutations. Qiacuity is a tool used in testing wastewater for SARS-CoV-2, according to Qiagen.

Leveraging Qiagen's capabilities in dPCR and sample preparation, Atila BioSystems has launched the iSafe NIPT kit for use on Qiacuity in singleton pregnancies. Processing on Qiacuity takes 2.5 hours compared to five hours for other tests.

The partnership with Actome involves a co-marketing agreement and provides Qiagen with a co-exclusive license for dPCR applications to use Actome's patented protein interaction-coupling (PICO) technology on Qiacuity as an ultrasensitive method to measure the smallest amounts of proteins and the interaction between proteins, as well as between proteins and genes. The PICO technology translates complex protein status into DNA barcodes that can be amplified and detected on Qiacuity.

No financial details were disclosed.