NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The Greater Paris University Hospitals (AP-HP) and molecular diagnostics firm IntegraGen said this week that they have signed an agreement to develop a high-throughput sequencing platform for research projects and clinical research initiatives.
The three-year partnership dovetails with AP-HP's 2015-2019 strategic plan to provide clinicians and patients access to newer health innovations and technological advancements. The agreement also represents an essential first step in the development of a formalized national personalized medicine initiative as a part of the French Plan for Genomic Medicine 2025, unveiled last week.
The partners noted that the planned sequencing platform will be utilized for both exome and whole-genome sequencing research projects in the fields of cancer, rare diseases, microbiology, and potentially psychiatry. The platform will encompass all stages of genomic analysis, from the collection of the biological sample to the delivery of sequencing results, the partners added.
The agreement will also allow for the development of additional research projects and cooperative initiatives with outside partners such as academic universities and INSERM.
"Sequencing is a complex process requiring perfect control of all stages of the analysis of biological samples," Bertrand Fontaine, vice president of research of the AP-HP executive board, said in a statement.
"The bioinformatic analysis of large amounts of sequencing data is also a major challenge," Fontaine added. "We are counting on our partnership with IntegraGen and the establishment of a pooled AP-HP bioinformatics platform to strengthen our expertise in this area. This partnership will also assist our biologists to better analyze raw sequencing data, ultimately enabling them to better study the correlation between phenotype and genetic variants."