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Personalis Gets Contract from Department of Veterans Affairs

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Personalis announced Tuesday that it has received a contract to provide sequencing and data analysis for the US Department of Veterans Affairs.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup said that the contract will utilize samples from several VA sources including the Million Veterans Program. It expects to provide sequencing and data analysis for more than 1,000 individuals under the contract.

The MVP is a large-scale project seeking to harness medical and genomic information from one million US veterans in order to identify health and disease-related genes. It was launched at the beginning of 2011 at one VA center but has since expanded.

"The VA's MVP has the potential to be the largest and most important medical sequencing effort in the world," Personalis CEO John West said in a statement.

Personalis said that it will QC all raw data, call variants against an advanced human reference sequence, annotate both SNV/indels and SVs, and provide genetic analyses to help confirm sample/data chain of custody. The company said that it would subcontract the laboratory genetic analysis, including sequencing and genotyping, to Illumina.

Financial and other terms of the contract were not disclosed.

Last month Personalis licensed exclusive rights to commercialize the Pharmacogenomics Knowledge Base (PharmGKB) and has launched its genome services for researchers.

Company officials told GenomeWeb Daily News sister publication Clinical Sequencing News earlier this month that the firm had signed a contract for a research project involving sequencing more than 1,000 whole genomes, but at that time it couldn't disclose who provided the contract.