Illumina Genotyping Solutions to Support Study of Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Illumina, Inc. has announced that the NIDDK1 Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) Genetics Consortium will utilize the Sentrix^® HumanHap300 BeadChips and Infinium™ assay reagents to genotype over 2000 case-control samples for a genome-wide study designed to help identify genetic variants that increase susceptibility to Crohn's disease (CD).

Principal Investigator of the Data Coordinating Center, Judy Cho, M.D., Associate Professor of Medicine, Section of Gastroenterology at the University of Chicago Hospitals, is leading the IBD study.

Dr. Cho and colleagues have assembled a well-characterized collection of disease samples and will perform the data analysis.

One thousand control individuals will be typed as part of the study, and the control genotypes will be made available to the scientific community.

"We feel that the rapid release of individual level genotypes for control populations will benefit the community of scientists who are working on complex genetic diseases," stated Dr. Peter K. Gregersen, M.D., Head of the Robert S. Boas Center for Genomics and Human Genetics at The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research.

"We are delighted to work with the NIDDK IBD Genetics Consortium and Illumina to make these data available in the context of this project."

Dr. Gregersen and his team will conduct the sample genotyping on an automated Illumina BeadStation using the Sentrix HumanHap300 BeadChip that can query over 317,000 tagSNPs on a single microarray device.

The BeadChip is powered by Illumina's Infinium assay, which enables the intelligent selection and analysis of virtually any SNP in the genome.

"We're delighted that the NIDDK IBD Genetics Consortium has selected Illumina technologies for this important study," said Jay Flatley, Illumina President and CEO.

"We are also very pleased to work once again with Peter Gregersen and to support his vision for making control genotyping data available to the scientific community."