NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Rady Children's Institute for Genomic Medicine announced today it will extend a collaboration with Edico Genome to expand the use of STAT-seq rapid whole-genome sequencing tests for critically ill newborns.
"Rapid diagnosis of critically ill newborns is no longer an academic exercise, it's a reality for critically ill newborns admitted to the NICU and PICU at Rady Children's Hospital," Stephen Kingsmore, president of Rady Children's Institute for Genomic Medicine, said in a statement. "The information we receive from this rapid and comprehensive testing is already helping our medical teams make treatment decisions and impacting the lives of these babies and their families."
Now, the partners want to push the test out to ICUs at other institutions and eventually develop an all-in-one appliance so the test can be performed onsite. They also plan to expand analysis to include more clinically relevant genetic variants such as structural and copy number mutations.
Financial and other details of the collaboration were not disclosed.
Approximately 30 percent of all NICU admissions and 20 percent of infant deaths are associated with genetic disease, the partners said. The STAT-seq test helps clinicians evaluate a patient for almost 4,500 genetic diseases in less than 26 hours. Edico's Dragen processor, designed to accelerate genomic data analysis, helps reduce the time needed to complete Rady's NICU whole-genome sequencing test.
Edico CEO Pieter van Rooyen noted that the Rady test is the first clinical application of the firm's Dragen processor. "This testing needs to be scaled for easy use by NICUs around the world," he said.
In a separate announcement, Edico said that Johns Hopkins Genomics will evaluate the Dragen processor for use in its whole-genome and whole-exome sequencing services for large-cohort research projects and clinical use.
Financial and other details were not disclosed.
Earlier this month, GeneWiz tapped Edico to support its NGS services and in may, IBM said it will incorporate Dragen into one of its high-performance computing clusters.