Mayo, Illumina forge bioinformatics partnership for genetic disorder testing
Mayo Clinic and biotechnology firm Illumina will collaborate on next-generation sequencing technology to further Mayo's genetic and genomic research, the orgnizations announced today.
Officials said the goal is to improve Mayo's reporting workflows for researching inherited diseases and to help Illumina build an informatics platform for improving and automating genomic interpretation.
Mayo will implement Illumina's BaseSpace Clarity LIMS in some of its laboratories to test the tool, as part of the agreement. The BaseSpace system provides comprehensive workflow integration and tracking in laboratories.
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The clinic will also pilot two Illumina tools: BaseSpace Sequence Hub, a cloud-based genomics computing environment that analyzes and manages data; and BaseSpace Variant Interpreter, a cloud-based reporting and interpreting platform to improve efficiency of the assessment of biological insight derived from genomic data.
The goal, officials said, is to annotate and interpret genetic variants and determine the role in disease progression and development.
"Through this relationship, we'll 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," William Morice, MD, chair of Mayo's Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, president of Mayo Medical Laboratories, said in a statement.
"Mayo Clinic has been at the forefront of advanced medical research and patient care for a long time," Sanjay Chikarmane, Illumina Enterprise Informatics's senior vice president and general manager said in a statement. "We're pleased our offering will help Mayo Clinic make sense of genomic data faster and more accurately."
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Email the writer: jessica.davis@himssmedia.com
