Complete Genomics said this week that SAIC-Frederick, on behalf of the National Cancer Institute, will use the company's bioinformatics services to analyze genomic data from 50 pediatric cancer cases from several research centers as part of a nationwide study on pediatric cancer.
The company said that in addition to sequencing the 50 tumor-normal pairs, it will use its bioinformatics tools to identify mutations such as single nucleotide polymorphisms, insertions and deletions, copy number variations, and somatic variations.
Complete Genomics will receive $1.1 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act upon completion of the project. The partners plan to include over 500 additional cancer cases over an 18-month period if this first phase of the project is successful.
Additional details of the contract were not disclosed.
The project is part of the NCI's Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments project, an initiative that uses genomic technologies to identify targets in childhood cancers with the goal of developing effective therapies and treatments for the diseases.
The partners plan to submit validated datasets to the National Center for Biotechnology Information's sequence read archive database as well as to the TARGET database.
Complete Genomics officials were unavailable for comment.