Illumina Introduces the Infinium® HumanHap550-Duo BeadChip

Illumina, Inc. announced the introduction of the Infinium HumanHap550-Duo BeadChip, the Company's fourth multi-sample DNA Analysis solution for genome-wide association (GWA) studies.

According to Illumina, the HumanHap550-Duo can provide the same content as the HumanHap550 BeadChip in a dual-sample format, resulting in greater throughput and low cost per sample. The introduction of the HumanHap550-Duo is another example of Illumina's overall strategy to leverage the flexibility of the BeadArray® technology to drive down the per sample cost while providing customers with high quality and product performance.

According to John Stuelpnagel, General Manager of Illumina's Array business, "We provide researchers with levels of genomic coverage, power, and data quality unrivaled by any other competing product. Additionally, our flexible manufacturing capability and increased scale affords us significant cost efficiencies, which we are now pleased to pass on to our customers."

The HumanHap550-Duo will provide the same content as the single-sample HumanHap550. Together with the HumanHap300 BeadChip, these products have led directly to the publication of over 30 peer-reviewed studies in the past eight months describing new gene-disease associations ranging from prostate cancer to diabetes, the company says.

The HumanHap550-Duo contains more than 550,000 SNPs, selected based on a tag SNP approach. This approach to content selection allows investigators to accelerate their research by maximizing study power with fewer samples.