Greater Paris University Hospitals, AP-HP and IntegraGen Agree to a Research Partnership
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This three-year research partnership aligns with a major objective of the AP-HP’s 2015-2019 Strategic Plan related to providing clinicians and patients access to newer health innovations and technological advancements. The agreement was approved by the Executive Board of the AP-HP on June 28, 2016.
Through the framework of this agreement, researchers, clinicians, and biologists of the AP-HP, one of the largest patient referral centers in Europe, will benefit from IntegraGen’s experience and expertise in large scale, industrial high throughput sequencing projects and its ability to deliver high quality data. This represents a major breakthrough for researchers at AP-HP since some were obliged to send DNA abroad to be sequenced prior to this agreement. This agreement represents an essential first step in the development of a formalized national personalized medicine initiative as a part of the French Plan for Genomic Medicine 2025.
The current initiative will enable sequencing data collected from biological samples to be transformed into genomic information and molecular diagnostic tools. The common high-throughput sequencing platform developed as a result of this agreement will be utilized for research projects in the fields of cancer, rare diseases, microbiology, and potentially psychiatry. Researchers utilizing this platform will have access to an integrated solution encompassing all stages of genomic analysis, from the collection of the biological sample to the delivery of sequencing results.
"Sequencing is a complex process requiring perfect control of all stages of the analysis of biological samples. The bioinformatic analysis of large amounts of sequencing data is also a major challenge,” stated Bertrand Fontaine, Vice President Research of the Executive Board of the AP-HP. “We are counting on our partnership with IntegraGen and the establishment of a pooled AP-HP bioinformatics platform to strengthen our expertise in this area. This partnership will also assist our biologists to better analyze raw sequencing data, ultimately enabling them to better study the correlation between phenotype and genetic variants."
The framework of the current agreement will also allow for the development of additional ambitious research projects and cooperative initiatives with outside research partners such as academic universities and INSERM.
"IntegraGen is extremely proud to develop a sequencing partnership for research projects and clinical research initiatives which will be dedicated to all AP-HP,” said Bernard Courtieu, IntegraGen’s CEO. “This is a major step in the growth of IntegraGen and again demonstrates our ability to provide expert solutions which meet the need of researchers and leads the way for the clinical adoption of molecular and personalized medicine advances. This strategic partnership demonstrates the recognition of the quality results IntegraGen’s provides and the expertise we have with sequencing platforms and advanced technologies, confirming our leadership among global companies operating in this field."
