WuXi NextCODE, DNAnexus Launch End-to-End Sequencing in China and Beyond

By Bio-IT World Staff

April 30, 2015 | Last week during the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, WuXi NextCODE and DNAnexus announced a strategic alliance to accelerate genomics worldwide.

“Bringing together the sophisticated cloud solution that DNAnexus has built together with the downstream informatics that WuXi NextCODE has created, and layering on top of that the extensive network that WuXi AppTech brings to the table, we now have a seamless and fully integrated platform to really bring precision medicine to the next level,” explained Hannes Smarason, Chief Operating Officer of WuXi NextCODE.

See, Chinese Services Group WuXi Buys NextCODE Health for $65m.

Integration is the theme Smarason and Richard Daly, CEO of DNAnexus, emphasized in talking about the arrangement. Within WuXi’s offerings are CLIA-certified sequencing, drug discovery and contract research services, and clinical genomics analysis and database capabilities. Connecting all of those pieces on the DNAnexus cloud will enable customers to generate, store, and interpret their sequence data and collaborate with colleagues around the world through one platform.

Using the integrated offering isn’t mandatory, of course. Both companies will keep their own independent offerings. But Smarason believes it will be a huge boon to customers. “We take the complexity out and enable the customer to have a single point of contact, and really not have to discover all of the different pieces,” he said. “The client can now expect to get a fully-populated and fully-minable data warehouse on their desktop, as opposed to having to piece all of these components together.”

For DNAnexus, the alliance was driven by customers’ needs, said Daly. “Our initial motivation was just following our existing customers, either pharma companies doing research that used genomics, or clinical diagnostic companies that are providing actual clinical reports that are useful in patient treatment. Their interest and their requirement has just grown remarkably in the last year to be able to operate in China. We needed a strong Chinese partners to enable global customers who are now participating in the very rapidly-growing, very important in-China market.”

The companies will provide and host the same platform and capabilities inside and outside of China, in full compliance with local regulations. Under the agreement, WuXi will license the DNAnexus platform and “launch a China cloud,” Smarason said.

Smarason and Daly believe the alliance will enable unprecedented flexibility, and will open the door to virtual research.

“Up to now, you had to have somebody in a white coat with lab techs. You had to have the physical instruments to do the test development. And you had to have the bioinformatics,” said Daly. “Now you’ll be able to pull all that apart, farm out those activities, and do virtual test development. That means the number of people who will be able to do test development in a major medical center, or a small startup, or large pharma will now grow rapidly.”

“This is going to be pretty revolutionary,” he continued. “Genomics is growing very rapidly as a global business.”