NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Congenica and the UK Northern Health Science Alliance today announced a partnership to develop diagnostic tools aimed at patients with genetic ailments.
The partnership focuses on accelerating collaborations between UK data analysis company Congenica and leading universities and NHS hospital trusts in the north of England by bringing together "clinical genetic expertise, molecular diagnostic testing, and large-scale genome analytics to develop and implement next-generation sequencing-based analysis pipelines, genome-wide interpretation, and reporting tools for diagnostic testing," Congenica and UKNHSA said in a statement.
Technologies developed as part of the collaboration will become available through service and licensing agreements.
Congenica and Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust have formed the first proof-of-principle agreement under the partnership to create a reference laboratory housed at the Manchester Centre for Genomic Medicine. There, patients and their unaffected relatives will be genomically screened to generate genetic profiles and clinical reports that will be used for diagnosing, making treatment decisions, and counseling patients.
The partnership will focus on developmental disorders, which account for about 30 percent of all genetic diseases. Programs in ophthalmological, cardiovascular, and neurological diseases will follow, Congenica and UKNHSA said.
Congenica last week announced it won a £200,000 ($337,000) competition award to further develop its Sapientia platform, a modular and scalable data analytics tool for annotating and clinically interpreting genomic sequence data.