NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) -- Illumina today announced it signed a definitive agreement to acquire clinical software firm NextBio.
NextBio, based in Santa Clara, Calif., provides platforms to aggregate and analyze large amounts of phenotypic and genomic data for research and clinical applications. It currently has customers at more than 50 commercial entities and academic institutions.
By acquiring the firm, Illumina "will be able to offer customers enterprise-level bioinformatics solutions that accelerate the discovery of new associations between the human genome and disease, and ultimately, enable the application of those discoveries within healthcare," according to a company statement.
NextBio's platform allows customers to compare experimental data against existing data sets using a correlation engine, enabling them to discover new associations. It uses "highly scalable" software-as-a-service enterprise technology and is capable of analyzing petabytes of data.
Illumina plans to combine its BaseSpace cloud computing environment for next-generation sequencing data with NextBio's platform for integrating patient data.
The acquisition is expected to close by the end of October. No financial terms were provided.
Illumina will integrate NextBio into its newly-formed Enterprise Informatics business and will retain NextBio's co-founder Ilya Kupershmidt and Chief Technology Officer Satnam Alag.