Illumina Agrees to Acquire Genomic Informatics Company, Strengthens IT Portfolio

(San Diego, CA, USA) has signed an agreement to acquire NextBio (Santa Clara, CA, USA), a developer of clinical and genomic informatics. NextBio’s comprehensive big-data platforms aggregate and analyze large quantities of phenotypic and genomic data for research and clinical applications.

With the addition of NextBio’s platform upon completion of the acquisition, Illumina will be able to offer customers enterprise level bioinformatics systems that will advance the discovery of new correlations between the human genome and disease, and finally, enable the application of those discoveries within healthcare.

“This agreement with NextBio demonstrates Illumina’s unwavering commitment to drive the adoption of sequencing in new markets and vastly improve the genomic information workflow,” said Jay Flatley, president and CEO of Illumina. “NextBio enables the classification and aggregation of phenotypic and clinical data within a single environment and allows analysis of that data at unprecedented speed and scale. The combination of Illumina’s BaseSpace cloud computing environment for next-generation sequencing with NextBio's platform for integrating patient data will allow us to deliver solutions that seamlessly integrate the entire workflow from sample to result.”

NextBio’s platform allows customers to quickly compare their experimental results against thousands of published and private data sets via a novel correlation engine, which precomputes billions of significant connections between disparate data components and helps discover new correlations. NextBio Clinical, which in 2012 passed an independent HIPAA audit, is designed for seamless integration with existing clinical and research systems. Backed by highly scalable software-as-a-service (SaaS) enterprise technology, it is capable of analyzing petabytes of data.

NextBio’s database platforms are currently used by researchers and clinicians in more than 50 commercial and academic institutions. NextBio will be incorporated into Illumina’s newly formed enterprise informatics business.

Illumina is a developer, manufacturer, and marketer of life science tools and integrated systems for the analysis of genetic variation and function. The company provides sequencing and array-based solutions for genotyping, copy number variation analysis, methylation studies, gene expression profiling, and low-multiplex analysis of DNA, RNA, and proteins. Illumina also provides tools and services for consumer genomics and diagnostics.

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