The partnership will combine expertise to advance precision medicine, while enabling efficient and timely insights into the diagnosis of rare diseases and hereditary cancer around the world
Twist, Centogene launch three new panels. (Credit: National Cancer Institute on Unsplash)
US-based Twist Bioscience and German life sciences company Centogene have rolled out three diagnostic panels to support rare disease and hereditary cancer research.
The three new panels include the Twist Alliance CNTG Exome Panel, the Twist Alliance CNTG Rare Disease Panel, and the Twist Alliance CNTG Hereditary Oncology Panel.
The new target enrichment next-generation sequencing (NGS) panels are said to enable in-depth sequencing on target genes, eliminating the need for complete sequencing.
They facilitate more sensitive detection of target genetic sequences and offer higher confidence that variants will be detected, said Twist Bioscience.
Twist Bioscience CEO and co-founder Emily M Leproust said: “Twist Alliance panels enable research by providing access to expert-developed panels tailored to specific research areas.
“Centogene brings highly curated expertise and data in rare diseases, an important complement to our existing Alliance panels.
“As we expand our offering of Alliance panels, we believe it is critical to offer expert-developed content in an off-the-shelf format, compatible with Twist’s extended custom panel offering, enabling a wider user base for these important tools.”
The Twist Alliance CNTG Exome Panel is designed using Twist’s core exome and reference sequencing, for enhanced coverage of relevant genes and variants related to rare diseases.
The Twist Alliance CNTG Rare Disease Panel enables the whole exome analysis of genetic markers that detect genes related to rare treatable diseases.
The Twist Alliance CNTG Hereditary Oncology Panel enables the detection of biomarkers that indicate a high risk of developing cancer.
The three new Alliance Panels are curated using the Centogene Biodatabank.
Furthermore, the partnership allows labs and research institutions can purchase these ready-made panels, and can use Centogene’s CentoCloud for diagnostic analysis.
Centogene chief executive officer Kim Stratton said: “There are over 7,000 rare diseases impacting over 350 million patients, many of whom are not diagnosed until the late stages of the disease.
“Our mission is to provide data-driven, life-changing answers as early as possible to ultimately accelerate the development of treatments.
“By partnering with Twist to develop these custom panels, we are enabling access to diagnostics and generating novel insights for the medical community, fuelled by multidimensional data from the Centogene Biodatabank.”