Illumina to Develop Custom, Multi-Sample Genotyping BeadChip for the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Wednesday September 28, 6:00 am ET
Custom SNP BeadChip to Be Used As Part of the Wellcome Trust Case-Control Consortium for Understanding Disease Associations
SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 28, 2005--Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN - News) announced today that it is collaborating with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI) and the Wellcome Trust Case-Control Consortium (WT-CCC) on the design of a custom Sentrix® BeadChip that will enable researchers to study the impact of those SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) that cause amino acid changes (non-synonymous), on a broad and deep range of disease samples. The WTSI will use the new BeadChip to study four common disease phenotypes with common controls as part of the WT-CCC.
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The new BeadChip configuration will enable the analysis of six samples simultaneously on one microarray, studying 15,000 SNPs apiece, using Illumina's powerful Infinium(TM) assay. The Infinium assay allows investigators to query the entire genome with call rates, reproducibility and related performance metrics comparable to Illumina's GoldenGate® assay protocol, a gold standard of the HapMap Project. The Infinium assay enables virtually unconstrained, intelligent SNP selection for BeadChip array content.
Content for the Sentrix cSNP-6 BeadChip will be composed principally of non-synonymous, coding SNPs selected from the HapMap Project. Non-synonymous SNPs are located in the coding regions of genes and cause amino acid changes in the corresponding proteins. As a result, these candidate functional SNPs - as a category -- are more likely to impact common disease susceptibility than the rest of genome (in addition to gene expression regulatory sequences that remain to be defined) and, therefore, have higher experimental value.
Given the ambitious scale and schedule of the non-synonymous SNP study, the WTSI has purchased additional scanners, automation and LIMS (laboratory information management system) capability to further increase sample throughput of the Institute's BeadLab, a production-scale, end-to-end genetic analysis laboratory that leverages Illumina's BeadArray(TM) technology.
According to Dr. Panos Deloukas, Senior Investigator at the WTSI, "We plan to genotype over 5000 samples with the non-synonymous SNP BeadChip in a case-control study design. Our schedule is to finish data production by the end of the year, a target made possible by Illumina's multi-sample chip. Non-synonymous SNPs are likely to be a productive early target in our quest to understand the genetic component of these common diseases."
Following the WTSI's completion of the project using the new genotyping BeadChip, Illumina intends to turn the custom SNP product into a standard microarray offering, at which time the Company will make available detail about locus selection and sequence information.
"We're very pleased to extend our longstanding relationship with the WTSI," stated Jay Flatley, Illumina President and CEO. "Our jointly developed SNP array not only provides high experimental value, it also underscores the flexibility of our BeadArray Technology, and particularly the BeadChip format. The non-synonymous SNP-6 Genotyping BeadChip will be the first multi-sample microarray product to leverage our Infinium assay."
Illumina (www.illumina.com) is developing next-generation tools for the large-scale analysis of genetic variation and function. The Company's proprietary BeadArray technology -- now used in leading genomics centers around the world -- provides the throughput, cost effectiveness and flexibility necessary to enable researchers in the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries to perform the billions of tests necessary to extract medically valuable information from advances in genomics and proteomics. This information will help pave the way to personalized medicine by correlating genetic variation and gene function with particular disease states, enhancing drug discovery, allowing diseases to be detected earlier and more specifically, and permitting better choices of drugs for individual patients. |
