Biotechnology firm Illumina and US-based Mayo Clinic have partnered to advance genetic disorder testing.
The deal includes making advancements in next-generation sequencing technology to speed up Mayo’s delivery of genetic and genomic expertise.
As part of the agreement, the organizations plan to integrate existing services and software tools and deploy new solutions to improve Mayo Clinic’s reporting workflows for researching inherited disease.
This process will assist Illumina in developing an informatics platform and knowledge base which is required to improve and automate genomic interpretation.
In particular, Mayo Clinic will implement BaseSpace Clarity LIMS to provide testing of the tool in specific laboratories.
The BaseSpace Clarity LIMS is designed to provide comprehensive workflow tracking and integration in laboratories.
A feedback will also be provided by Mayo Clinic on the use of BaseSpace Sequence Hub, a cloud-based genomics computing environment for data analysis and management, and BaseSpace Variant Interpreter, a cloud-based interpretation and reporting platform designed to assess biological insight from genomic data in lesser time.
Illumina Enterprise Informatics senior vice-president and general manager Sanjay Chikarmane said: “BaseSpace Informatics Suite has the ability to provide a cloud-based software solution that can manage, analyze and interpret data automatically.”
Using the software solutions, Mayo Clinic will interpret the potential role of the genetic variants in the development and progression of diseases.
Mayo Medical Laboratories president and Mayo Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology chair William Morice II said: “Through this relationship, we will be able to generate large volumes of genomic information, interrogate the data, and then compare it to what’s known about those variants and those genetic aberrations in real time, saving our geneticists time.”