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news.US genetics-focused company, Illumina has agreed to sell its BeadStation system and genotyping arrays and reagents to the Korean firm PharmacoDesign, for use in pharmacogenomics studies.
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PharmacoDesign will genotype various Korean populations with the aim of understanding genetic variation and personalizing treatment for optimal clinical outcomes.
Under the agreement, Illumina will gain access to biomarkers discovered by Pharmaco and will be able to incorporate such markers into proprietary SNP panels under a worldwide, royalty-bearing exclusive license.
Pharmaco will study diseases that include obesity, cancer and allergy-induced reactions such as atopy. The company works in partnership with large Korean hospitals to prescribe individualized treatments that utilize diet and “functional foods” in addition to traditional pharmacological approaches.
Initially, Pharmaco will utilize Illumina’s Sentrix Human-1 BeadChip, which contains over 100,000 SNP markers, 70% of which are located in or very near genes for direct disease association studies. The Human-1 is powered by Illumina’s Infinium assay, which allows investigators to query the entire genome with call rates, reproducibility and related performance metrics comparable to Illumina’s GoldenGate assay protocol, a gold standard of the HapMap Project. The Infinium assay enables virtually unconstrained, intelligent SNP selection for BeadChip array content.