NIH-Funded Group Will Use Hap-Map Data, Illumina Tools to Identify Statin Response

NEW YORK, Oct. 20 (GenomeWeb News) - Illumina will provide the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute with reagents and instrumentation that will be used to identify and study SNPs involved in statin response, the company said today.

The study, part of the NIH-funded Pharmacogenomics and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease program, also aims to identify SNPs associated with statin-related myopathy, an "uncommon" side effect, Illumina said.

Deborah Nickerson, co-principal investigator of the PARC study and professor of Genome Sciences at the Universityof Washington, will perform sample genotyping for all phases of the research using an Illumina BeadStation system and four leased Illumina BeadArray Readers, the company said.

Researchers will draw samples from "large" clinical trials previously carried out by investigators at PARC and other programs that tested effects of the statin drugs simvastatin, pravastatin, rosuvastatin, and atorvastatin.

Phase I will involve whole-genome association analysis of more than 1,000 clinical samples using Illumina's Sentrix Human-1 BeadChip and a follow-on Sentrix HumanHap-1 BeadChip that can query over 250,000 TagSNPs derived from the International HapMap Project, of which Illumina is a participant. The study will also use Illumina's Infinium assay, which enables researchers to select and analyze SNPs.

After this phase, other phases will seek to evaluate haplotype blocks, specific haplotypes within each block, and SNPs within those haplotypes "to identify the most informative variants and those that have causal association with clinical phenotypes," Illumina said. More than 10,000 samples will be tested in the latter phases of the project, which will employ Illumina's GoldenGate assay protocol, custom panels of SNP markers, and Sentrix Universal Array Matrices, the company said.