NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – BioMérieux and Illumina today announced a collaboration to develop applications for microbiology sequencing technologies.
The work, to be conducted over a four-year renewable period, will combine Illumina's MiSeq next-generation sequencing system with a jointly developed pathogen genome database based on BioMérieux's culture collection containing more than 80,000 references.
The first application will be an NGS epidemiological solution to enable service labs to genotype disease agents. The application will provide "easily accessible and highly accurate information to communities and hospitals to track, prevent, contain, and stop the spread of disease agents" by delivering "a standardized report with a genomic profile of the infectious agent with sequence-level accuracy and depth of information," the partners said.
The goal of the collaboration is to arm public health and hospital microbiology labs with tools to contain an epidemic, avoid transmission of infectious agents, and improve hospital practices. Healthcare providers will be able to send the relevant isolates to a designated lab equipped with an Illumina platform. Genetic sequences will be sent securely through a cloud platform to be analyzed using the database and software developed by BioMérieux, and the lab will be able to generate a customized report for the customer.
Financial and other terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
"With this new collaboration, we will enrich our commercial offering by adding a sequencing solution dedicated to infectious diseases," BioMérieux Chairman Jean-Luc Belingard said in a statement. "Moreover, this collaboration is a first step that will enable BioMérieux to identify opportunities and fields of application that sequencing can bring to infectious disease diagnostics."