NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Illumina and Genomics England announced today that they are teaming up to develop a set of informatics tools that can be used to improve and automate the interpretation of genomic data.
The tools, which will be housed within Genomics England's secure database for researchers and clinicians, will be used to interpret clinical genomic data and support medical decision making, and to curate data in the 100,000 Genomes Project. All the tools will be developed with open application programming interfaces so that researchers and bioinformatics experts can continue to refine and improve them, the companies said.
Under the terms of the deal, Illumina will develop interpretation and reporting tools that have the ability to deliver reports on all genomes sequenced through the 100,000 Genome Project to researchers and clinicians. Genomics England will provide access to the data from whole-genome sequencing and phenotyping.
Genomics England will also have the opportunity to work with other Illumina data management tools, such as NextBio and BaseSpace, through NextBio Clinical to enable cohort analysis of complex phenotypic and genotypic information from de-identified genomes.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
"Our partnership with Genomics England will help change the way healthcare is practiced," said Illumina CEO Jay Flatley in a statement. "The development of our suite of technologies and platforms is critical to enabling physicians in the future to make educated diagnoses based on a patient's genome which will lead to better health outcomes."