San Diego-based Illumina Inc. announced deals on Monday with two universities and a pair of healthcare organizations to genotype large sample collections in a pilot study.
The data derived from the collections at Vanderbilt University, University of Colorado at Denver, Partners HealthCare and Montreal Heart Institute will be used to study heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, bipolar disorder and Crohn's disease, among other diseases.
The institutions will use equipment made by Illumina to analyze around 200,000 samples among themselves.
"These four personalized medicine programs represent progressive examples of how characterizing the genome using multiple genetic analysis solutions is significantly advancing the understanding of human biology," said Christian Henry, Illumina's executive vice president and chief commercial officer. "These programs are at the forefront of translational research and the clinical application of genomic data."
Half the samples that will undergo genetic analysis are at Vanderbilt, a national leader in DNA banking biological material, biomedical informatics and pharmacogenomics data.
The Anschutz Medical Campus at Colorado has launched a personalized medicine initiative that integrates electronic medical records with molecular data, genetic mapping and basic biology.
Boston-based Partners Healthcare will study 25,000 samples from its biobank, while the Montreal Heart Institute will analyze 50,000.
