Agilent Technologies and Cartagenia has announced that they have signed a definitive agreement under which Agilent will acquire Cartagenia, a leading provider of software and services for clinical genetics and molecular pathology labs.

Uniquely geared to routine clinical labs, Cartagenia's solutions are FDA-registered as exempt Class I Medical Devices in the U.S. and as Class I Medical Devices in Europe. The Cartagenia Bench platform enables technicians, lab directors and clinicians to visualize, assess and report clinical genetics data in the context of patient information.

With Cartagenia Bench, labs can build an internal knowledge base, build variant assessment SOPs, automate report drafting, and access a wide range of community-validated, private and premium content resources, whether for oncology or inherited disease.

Cartagenia's platform also provides deep support for consortia of collaborating labs.

"Cartagenia's approach to enabling the interpretation of clinical genomics data is revolutionary. We look forward to providing Cartagenia's software solutions to our clinical genetics and molecular oncology customers and to providing Cartagenia's existing customers with access to our global service and support network. Together, Agilent and Cartagenia can help remove bottlenecks inherent in analysis, interpretation and reporting clinical data-resulting in faster answers for patients," said Mr Jacob Thaysen, president of Agilent's Diagnostics and Genomics Group.

"Joining forces with Agilent is an excellent strategic fit and provides tremendous opportunity both for our customers-who will benefit from integration with a broad family of solutions and a range of new applications-and for our team, as we'll be able to further accelerate our success and growth through Agilent's global reach and leading footprint in clinical labs," said Mr Herman Verrelst, chief executive officer, Cartagenia.

The acquisition is expected to be completed by May 19, subject to local laws and regulations and customary closing conditions. Cartagenia employs 36 people, all of whom will be offered employment with Agilent.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.