The Asia Cancer Research Group and BGI plan to collaborate on a project to genomically characterize lung and liver tumors, BGI said last week. The project is part of ACRG's larger goal of creating a freely accessible data source on cancers that are prevalent in Asia in the hopes of guiding drug development. Lung and liver cancer are two of the most prevalent cancers in Asia.
BGI will provide next-gen sequencing services and bioinformatics analysis and the ACRG will provide the tumor samples.
The project "will accelerate the establishment of a pharmacogenomic database for Asian lung and liver cancers," Mao Mao, president of ACRG and research fellow at Pfizer, said in a statement. "We are hoping to increase our knowledge of these two common cancers in Asia, and to accelerate the development of new diagnostic methods and therapies," he added.
The ACRG was launched two years ago, and is a collaboration between Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Merck. Mao previously told In Sequence that the ACRG would first focus on lung and gastric cancer followed by liver cancer, analyzing 1,000 of each tumor type using gene expression and genotyping, and then selecting a subset of those tumors for sequencing.
Financial terms of the agreement with BGI were not disclosed.