DNA sequencing company Illumina and Nashville Biosciences, a wholly owned subsidiary of Nashville, Tenn.-based Vanderbilt University Medical Center, are working with biopharmaceutical company Amgen to whole-genome sequence approximately 35,000 DNA samples from a mostly African American cohort.
As part of the agreement, DeCode Genetics, a subsidiary of Amgen, will perform whole-genome sequencing on the samples using Illumina platforms and will upload the data to the Illumina Connected Analytics platform.
"The initial cohort will be among the largest sequencing efforts involving African Americans to date," Nashville Biosciences CEO Leeland Ekstrom, PhD, said in a June 9 press release from Vanderbilt. "Once complete, this dataset will provide a wealth of new information about the human genome and accelerate the study of disease in — and discovery of new therapeutics for — populations less well represented in prior large-scale sequencing efforts."
According to the press release, African Americans are "currently underrepresented in research for the clinical applications of genomics, including drug target discovery."
This will be the first project of the Alliance for Genomic Discovery, a multiyear agreement between Illumina and Nashville Biosciences to accelerate therapeutic development through large-scale genomics.