NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – NextCode Health said this week that University College Dublin will use its solutions to in studies focused on better understanding and diagnosing autism and rare diseases.
Specifically, the UC Dublin's Academic Center on Rare Diseases (ACORD) will used NextCode's products — including the Clinical Sequence Analyzer and SequenceMiner — to identify causal mutations in families with a range of rare disorders and to look for variants associated with autism spectrum disorders.
In a statement, Sean Ennis, director at ACORD, described the addition of NextCode's solutions as "key to our strategy of building on ACORD's reputation in rare genomics to establish ourselves as a center of excellence in this field."
He added that "sequencing is a powerful means to identify the causes of disease, but it requires the ability to efficiently store and query truly vast amounts of data," which NextCode's system enables.
Financial and other terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Other customers of NextCode's solutions include the ANZAC Research Institute in Sydney, Australia. Researchers there are using the company's tools to explore rare, structural, and other variants that are linked to the neurodegenerative disorder, X-linked Charcot-Marie-Tooth syndrome.