Roche has decided to shutter its NimbleGen microarray business, and will phase out array production and services by the end of the year. At the same time, the firm will continue to provide target enrichment products for use with next-generation sequencing, a spokesperson confirmed this week.

As part of the restructuring, most current Roche NimbleGen employees will lose their jobs. The spokesperson told BioArray News that 44 out of the company's 100 staffers at its headquarters in Madison, Wis., will be laid off by year end, while all 76 positions at the company's facilities in Iceland and Germany will be eliminated.

The spokesperson did not explain Roche's decision to exit the array market or what would become of the company's array-related assets, other than saying that the firm has "decided to concentrate ... on sequence capture." But she confirmed that the company is the number four player in the global array market in terms of sales, behind Illumina, Affymetrix, and Agilent Technologies.

Kary Staples, director of international marketing at Roche NimbleGen, was quoted in a Wisconsin Business Journal article as saying that the array market is an "extremely competitive field" and that Roche NimbleGen has "always been a smaller player in that." He added that Roche has decided to refocus on areas where it can "be a strong player."

Staples did not return an e-mail seeking additional comment. But the Roche spokesperson confirmed the content of the WBJ article, in which it was noted that Roche will maintain R&D, manufacturing, and marketing staff in Madison, and that it has tapped Tom Albert, a former NimbleGen Systems executive, to lead a team to develop new technologies for the life sciences market.

NimbleGen Systems was founded in 1999 based on technology developed at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The firm planned an initial public offering of stock in 2007, but Roche bought NimbleGen for $272.5 million before it could go public ((BAN 6/26/2007)).

It is unclear what impact Roche's decision to exit the array market will have on its service providers and customers. The company also provides arrays for a number of partners, such as PerkinElmer's Signature Genomic Laboratories, which uses its comparative genomic hybridization arrays in its cytogenetic testing services.

Lisa Shaffer, chief scientific officer of PerkinElmer's molecular diagnostics business and cofounder of Signature, declined to comment on Roche's decision to exit the market.