BGI To Install BGISEQ-500 In Toronto

By Bio-IT World Staff

May 4, 2018 | BGI Genomics announced two new partnerships today, including the first North American deployment of the BGISEQ-500.

Last November, BGI signed a memorandum of understanding with the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, part of Sinai Health System, in Toronto, Canada. The two institutions were awarded a $4.6 CAD million Genomic Applications Partnership Program (GAPP) investment from Genome Canada and Ontario Genomics. They plan to collaborate on the development a genomics-based diagnostic test for the early identification of women at risk for pre-term birth and other pregnancy complications.

BGI will install two BGISEQ-500 sequencers onsite at Sinai Health System, Charles Bao, general manager of BGI Americas, told Bio-IT World. He expects the sequencers to be installed in two to three months.

The BGISEQ-500 platform is a sequencing system based on combinatorial Probe-Anchor Synthesis (cPAS) and DNA Nanoball (DNBTM) technology, developed by Complete Genomics, which BGI acquired in 2013. BGI reports that the platform does whole genome sequencing for $600 with single-tube library prep, high quality and high coverage.

The BGISEQ-500 platforms installed in Toronto will belong to BGI and will be removed at the end of the research project, but their capacity isn’t limited to the pre-term birth research project, Bao said. “The priority is to make sure the research collaboration project we were awarded is finished according to the schedule, but if the instrument has additional capacity, it can certainly accommodate additional work,” Bao said.

“The Mt Sinai collaboration is focused on maternal health,” Yin Ye, CEO of BGI Genomics, told Bio-IT World. “The Mt Sinai hospital is the leading maternal health hospital in Canada. This [research] will help reduce the pregnancy complications and help improve health outcomes for the mother and the child. And also help save the Canadian healthcare system C$200 million per year, reducing the burden of the neonatal ICUs.”

Johns Hopkins Partnership

BGI also announced that it will begin a collaboration later this year with the Johns Hopkins University on pancreatic cancer precision medicine. The research project involves using BGI sequencing technologies in China to jointly profile patient cohorts using genomic assays. At this time there are no plans to install sequencers at Johns Hopkins, Bao said.

The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine is working to establish the Pancreatic Cancer Precision Medicine Center of Excellence (PMCoE) program; BGI is working with the Center of Excellence to build the genomic and immunogenomic database of pancreatic cancer and para-pancreatic malignancies. “The collaboration, currently, is a research collaboration focused on biomarker discovery. The sequencing work will be performed in BGI’s lab, and the [researchers] will work together to do their discoveries.”

“Johns Hopkins is one of the most well-known hospitals in the world, and I think it’s number one in the treatment of pancreatic cancer,” Ye said. “The hospital has a long-term mission to the improvement of precision medicine. So we are excited and honored to be chosen to help with this ambitious goal, starting from building the genetic database under the precision medicine center of excellence as our first step.”