NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Life Technologies today announced its participation in the Stratified Medicine Scotland Innovation Centre, or SMS-IC, a collaboration among academic, industrial, and the UK's National Health Service community to create a stratified medicine research infrastructure.
Life Tech is the lead commercial partner in SMS-IC along with biomedical informatics firm Aridhia, and the Ion Proton benchtop sequencer will be used as the primary tool "to drive discovery and genetic analysis."
The goal of SMS-IC is to "prove the principle of stratified clinical trials," and a number of projects will be initiated this year linking patient phenotype, genotype, and other data that enable the targeting of specific populations for clinical trials. Ion Torrent is for research-use only, but Life Tech said that, ultimately, the goal is to progress stratified clinical trial models from concept to clinical use.
In addition, SMS-IC will hold a competition to identify appropriate projects, Life Tech said.
"The vision for this project is to combine an individual's detailed genomic data with more traditional patient information to enable faster, more accurate, and effective clinical decisions," Peter Silvester, president of Europe, Middle East, and Africa of Life Technologies, said in a statement.