NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Agilent Technologies said today that the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium will use the firm’s custom-made, whole-genome copy number variation microarrays in the next phase of the genetic variation study.
Agilent is the third company to announce that the WTCCC is using its arrays for the second phase of the project. Previously, Illumina and Affymetrix both announced their technologies are being employed by researchers in the study.
The WTCCC is a group of UK researchers who began in 2005 studying thousands of genotyped human samples for genes associated with coronary heart disease, hypertension, types 1 and 2 diabetes, bipolar disorder, Crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, tuberculosis, autoimmune thyroid disease, ankylosing spondylitis, multiple sclerosis, and breast cancer.
Agilent said that genetic samples will be processed by Oxford Gene Technology, which is a UK-based Agilent microarray certified service provider.
“This is an important new study of human genetic variation in common disease for which we require high-resolution microarrays with extremely reproducible performance,” said Matthew Hurles of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.