Macrogen, Inc. Increases Investment in Illumina’s Next-Generation Sequencing Technology
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Illumina announced that Macrogen, Inc., a global sequencing services company based in Korea, purchased an additional ten Illumina HiSeq 2000 systems and two MiSeq systems, as well as HiSeq 2500 upgrades. This strategic scale-up expands Macrogen’s capacity with Illumina’s sequencing systems and will be completed by the end of 2012.
“Macrogen’s decision to significantly increase their sequencing capacity is further validation that Illumina is the platform of choice for sequencing service providers,” said Tim Orpin, Vice President of Illumina’s Asia Pacific Region. “HiSeq and MiSeq systems deliver state-of-the-art performance with unmatched daily output, reliability, and ease of use. Illumina and Macrogen have built a strong collaborative relationship, and the new investment will support Macrogen’s efforts to transform medical genomics in Asia and the rest of the world.”
Professor Jeong-Sun Seo, Chairman of Macrogen, added, “Our vision is to improve quality of life by enhancing understanding of the human genome, and to be a global leader in providing genome sequencing services, towards the ultimate goal of personalized medicine. As part of these efforts, we launched a premium global sequencing service, Axeq, in 2011.”
Macrogen is also collaborating with researchers and physicians to identify novel targets for disease genes, and identified a fusion gene, KIF5B-RET, from a non-smoking lung cancer patient last year.
“We are very excited about this new finding and other discoveries being enabled by next generation sequencing,” said Dr. Hyungtae Kim, CEO of Macrogen. “Our goal is to develop diagnostic tests on the MiSeq platform, and the upgrades to HiSeq 2500 will give us the ability to sequence whole human genomes on one machine in a day. This is critical to providing the turnaround time required for clinical samples. We also want the ability to combine HiSeq and MiSeq data, to save time and cost, and ultimately to provide the best service to our customers.”
