Almac Group invests in next gen sequencing capabilities

Published: 18-Oct-2018

The new Illumina NovaSeq 6000 sequencer aims to benefit Almac's biopharma clients’ biomarker discovery and clinical trial projects

Almac Diagnostic Services, a medicine company specialising in biomarker driven clinical trials, has made a significant investment in a new Illumina NovaSeq 6000 sequencer, which will benefit Biopharma clients’ biomarker discovery and clinical trial projects.

The addition of the NovaSeq’s powerful processing capabilities to Almac’s existing range of NGS platform offerings allows for larger sample runs, greater read depth and faster speeds. The new instrument will ultimately reduce sample turnaround times and increase variant detection quality and accuracy for clients.

With the NovaSeq, Almac will be able to sequence the transcriptomes of up to ~384 samples, per run (dual flow cell, 50m reads per sample) in a timeframe as short as 36 hours.

The NovaSeq provides scalable throughput and flexibility for virtually any sequencing method, genome, and scale of project. To accommodate NovaSeq’s high capacity and efficiency, Almac has also invested in appropriate informatics infrastructure and installed high speed uplinks to cloud based providers.

The NovaSeq will form an integral part of Almac’s current DNA and RNA Sequencing offerings and future offerings for whole genome sequencing (WGS) and whole exome sequencing (WES).

Almac Diagnostic Services already has extensive expertise in next generation sequencing (NGS) technology and bioinformatics. The company offers a customisable solution that allows clients to tailor their diagnostic requirements across multiple platforms and chemistry options to suit their specific translational research or clinical trial needs.

Michael Sloan, Global VP of Commercial Operations, Almac Diagnostic Services, said: “We are excited about the potential benefits the NovaSeq will be able to bring to our customers with its sequencing capabilities enhancing our current DNA and RNA NGS panel offerings to the market. We are positioning ourselves at the cutting edge of NGS diagnostics and the investment in this new NGS platform will help Almac to continue to play a leading role within stratified medicine.”

The NovaSeq will also support Almac Diagnostic Services new unique gene expression report, claraT, which will be launched to market at ESMO 2018 in Munich in October.

ClaraT is a software-driven solution, classifying biologically relevant gene expression signatures into a comprehensive, easy-to-interpret report for cancer research/biomarker discovery.

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