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Veritas Genetics, Mayo Clinic Partner to Expand Access to WGS

CHICAGO (GenomeWeb) – Mayo Clinic is teaming with sequencing startup Veritas Genetics in an effort to make whole-genome sequencing available to the masses.

Under terms of a partnership announced today, Veritas will integrate medical and clinical expertise from Mayo's Center for Individualized Medicine into its myGenome WGS platform. The Rochester, Minnesota-based institution will offer the myGenome sequencing test and interpretation services to those who qualify for a Mayo Clinic study of healthy adults.

Mayo also is taking an unspecified ownership stake in Boston-based Veritas.

Keith Stewart, medical director of the Mayo Center for Individualized Medicine, will lead the collaboration. Mayo said that it will put any revenue it receives from the partnership back into patient care, education and research.

"The Center for Individualized Medicine at Mayo Clinic is the gold standard in personalized medicine and we are proud and honored to collaborate with such a professional and dedicated team," Veritas Genetics Founder and CEO Mirza Cifric said in a statement. "This is a great step to further realize the promise of the human genome."

Veritas expanded its informatics capabilities in August by acquiring fellow Harvard Medical School Personal Genome Project spinout Curoverse, creator of an open-source bioinformatics platform called Arvados. This, according to the Veritas, allows the company to scale its technology to support an effort as large as Mayo's.

"This next step is basically the first domino in making WGS widely available for healthy people in the clinical setting," a Veritas spokesman said via email.

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