By Diagnostics World Staff
September 16, 2015 | Less than a year after NextCODE
Health was bought by Chinese services group WuXi PharmaTech, WuXi NextCODE
has announced a partnership with the Children’s Hospital of Fudan University
(CHFU) to bring genomic testing to clinical use in China for the first time.
WuXi NextCODE is deploying the full range of its genome testing
infrastructure for CHFU: CLIA sequencing, massively scalable informatics, and powerful
interpretation tools and clinical genetics expertise.
CHFU is a tertiary hospital in Shanghai serving 2.3 million
patients from across the country. The WuXi
NextCODE pipeline will be available to any physician that needs genomic
analysis, Hannes Smarason, co-founder, President and COO of WuXi NextCODE told
Diagnostics World. Smarason expects to be able to rapidly scale up
sequence-based testing to resolve more undiagnosed cases.
“We have done a few patients [already],” Smarason said. “It’s
actually building up to be a very, very rapid launch. I wouldn’t be surprised
if within very short order they wouldn’t be numbering in the hundreds.”
Smarason said that the launch is leveraging many of the same
lessons learned from WuXi NextCODE’s recent work with Boston Children’s
Hospital.
“This is a system we’ve tried and tested with BCH, where we
have the clinical service being very tightly linked with the research application,”
Smarason said. “Having that tight interlink is really at the core of being able
to come to the right diagnosis and at the same time being able to leverage the
expertise from the research community.”
The CHFU partnership, Smarason said, allows WuXi NextCODE to,
“bring [the platform] to China to really understand and create a global
standard for genomic data medicine.” Geography has certainly enabled the
partnership. Both CHFU and WuXi NextCODE are based in Shanghai.
“Looking for the genomics infrastructure that could deliver
the best results for our patients, we saw that our colleagues at Harvard
Medical School and other leading institutions were choosing WuXi NextCODE,”
said Guoying Huang, President of CHFU in a statement. “We’ve come to the same
conclusion. Using the emerging global standard for genomic data in medicine, we
can move beyond static gene panels to employ the full power of the genome to
address rare diseases, genetic and genetics-related disorders and eventually
cancer and other conditions as well. We can also collaborate instantly with sister
institutions that use WuXi NextCODE’s system to push the frontiers of care and
discovery.”
In the same statement, Smarason said: “Our aim is to bring
our technology into the clinic to deliver precision medicine to patients in
every market worldwide. China is central to that strategy, and we couldn’t have
a better partner than Fudan Children’s for realizing it and giving thousands of
young patients and their families the best diagnostics and treatment options for
inherited rare disorders.”