NEW YORK – South Korea's Sanigen said on Wednesday that it has partnered with Illumina to develop next-generation sequencing panels for food safety testing. The company will also become a distributor of Illumina's sequencing technology in South Korea for the food safety and microbiology market.
The firms will develop NGS panels that can rapidly detect 16 types of foodborne pathogens from about 400 samples. Sanigen said it expects the panels to be available in the third quarter. Financial and other details of the deal were not disclosed.
"NGS offers an unprecedented opportunity to the food market to improve safety. We are delighted to partner with Sanigen whose deep expertise in this sector will be a driving force in bringing new accurate and rapid tests to the food safety market," Gretchen Weightman, VP and general manager for Illumina in Asia-Pacific and Japan, said in a statement.
The agreement follows other deals Illumina has struck with firms on assay development. In May, the San Diego-based company partnered with Australia's Microba on human gut microbiome sequencing, and in April, it announced a collaboration with Kartos Therapeutics to develop an NGS-based TP53 companion diagnostic for that firm's MDM2 inhibitor.