Oxford, UK and Santa Clara, CA - 25 February 2010. Following almost two years as an Agilent microarray Certified Service Provider, Oxford Gene Technology (OGT) and Agilent Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: A), today announced that OGT is the first company to be named as a High-Throughput Certified Service Provider (HT CSP) for Agilent microarrays. This new level of the Agilent certification provides official validation of OGT's use of Agilent microarrays in a high-throughput environment and reflects OGT's status as the supplier of choice for large-scale outsourced microarray studies.

The certificate has been awarded following rigorous assessment of the high-quality experimental data routinely generated by OGT's unique high-throughput analysis service - Genefficiency^TM. OGT's facility recently completed a 22,000 sample, array comparative genomic hybridisation (aCGH) copy number variation (CNV) study for the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium. This was the largest ever CNV study to date, generating almost 2 billion data points to exacting quality requirements, in a short timeframe of only 20 weeks.¹

The HT CSP Certificate was warmly welcomed by OGT's CEO, Mike Evans: "This certification is a significant endorsement of OGT capabilities. Importantly, this endorsement is also reflected in our customer recommendations; around 65% of our business comes from word-of-mouth, with close to a 100% referral rate from new and existing customers. And we're not standing still, as we have made significant investments in personnel, equipment and facilities to maintain our position as the worldwide leader in high quality, high-throughput microarray analysis."

Chris Grimley, Senior Marketing Director of Agilent Technologies Genomics business said: "Agilent is pleased to offer OGT our first certification for High-Throughput Service Provider.  OGT has been very successful integrating Agilent Automation Solution instrumentation and Agilent microarrays for an efficient laboratory workflow.  We are confident that customers will benefit from the combination of Agilent products and OGT high-throughput service."

OGT's experience, particularly in the development of customised arrays, combined with Agilent's microarray platform, provides customers with a comprehensive and flexible service using high density, high sensitivity microarrays, for all key applications.

References:

• 1. Conrad, D.F., et al. Origins and functional impact of copy number variation in the human genome. Nature 2009 Oct 7 [Epub ahead of print].

For further information on OGT products and services please visit http://www.ogt.co.uk.