NEW YORK – Oxford Nanopore Technologies said Monday that it will participate in Singapore’s National Precision Medicine (NPM) program to help improve the understanding of the country’s genetic architecture.
Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
Oxford Nanopore said it will sequence 10,000 genomes representing Singapore’s diverse population, including Malay, Indian, and Chinese communities, as part of the second phase of the NPM program. The goal is to develop a comprehensive structural variant catalog of the country's three major ethnic groups. The company’s portion of the project, which started in mid-2024 and will run up to 12 months, will be carried out by genomics service provider NovogeneAIT using the PromethIon 48 device for sequencing.
Led by Precision Health Research Singapore (PRECISE), an organization established by the Singapore government, Phase II of the three-phase NPM program was kicked off in 2021 to analyze the genetic makeup of 100,000 healthy Singaporeans and up to 50,000 individuals with specific diseases. The country hopes to harness the genetic insights from the project to inform precision medicine for its populations.
"We are excited to collaborate with Singapore’s National Precision Medicine (NPM) program to create one of the most extensive and inclusive reference genome datasets globally," Oxford Nanopore CEO Gordon Sanghera said in a statement. "This collaboration not only enhances our commitment to precision healthcare but also strategically positions Singapore as a pivotal hub for genomics in the Asia Pacific, fostering significant advancements in medical research and healthcare outcomes."
Oxford Nanopore said it has made strategic investments in Singapore, its commercial hub for Asia Pacific, including a recent expansion of its lab facilities in the country and deploying sequencers at the Science Centre Singapore and the Singapore Institute of Technology for use in high school, undergraduate, and adult education programs.
Earlier this year, Oxford Nanopore competitor Pacific Biosciences signed a similar deal with the national Estonian Biobank, which will use the company's Revio HiFi sequencing system to analyze 10,000 human genomes from its biorepository.