NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Tute Genomics is partnering with Genatak, a personalized medicine company based in Kuwait, to make Tute's cloud-based platform available to clinical laboratories and hospitals across the Arabian Gulf States.
Tute recently announced that Genatak has deployed Tute's platform internally to interpret data from its own molecular diagnostic services. The Jabriya, Kuwait-based company offers targeted hereditary cancer panels, as well as exome and whole-genome sequencing services, for patients with cancer, undiagnosed genetic disorders, and individuals looking to understand their disease risk.
In addition to using the platform, Genatak will offer the Tute platform to regional clinical labs and hospitals for their analysis and interpretation needs as part of the agreement. Genatak will also offer educational workshops throughout the Middle East aimed at educating pathologists and clinicians on the benefits of Tute's platform, as well as genomic medicine in general, Tute said.
"The scarcity of bioinformatic experts, especially in the Middle East ... the rapidly changing nature of the required analysis, the lack of properly curated variation databases, and the anxiety of clinicians in handling big data are major obstacles hindering the successful implementation of genomic medicine in clinical practice," Fahd Al-Mulla, director of Genatak-Global Medical Clinic, said in a statement. "Bioinformatics challenges are magnified several fold when it comes to implementing genomic medicine in the Middle East because Arab-Middle East-specific variants are nowhere to be found in major databases."
Financial and other terms of the agreement were not disclosed.