Mayo Clinic and SV Bio enter strategic relationship on genome diagnostics and interpretation

Public release date: 22-Jan-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Sam Smith newsbureau@mayo.edu 507-284-5005 Mayo Clinic

ROCHESTER, Minn. and FOSTER CITY, Calif. -- Mayo Clinic and Silicon Valley Biosystems (SV Bio) today announced a strategic collaboration for whole genome diagnostics and interpretation at the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine and Mayo Medical Laboratories. This strategic collaboration unites SV Bio's proprietary genome interpretation solution with Mayo Clinic's growing genome reference library and its commitment to individualized medicine, and will increase accessibility and clinical utility of next-generation sequencing for patients. SV Bio will provide clinical genome interpretation services and clinical decision support interfaces to Mayo Clinic, and Mayo's Center for Individualized Medicine will contribute clinical and laboratory expertise and support. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.

"At Mayo Clinic, we are committed to integrating genomic medicine into the continuum of care for all of our patients," says Gianrico Farrugia, M.D., director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine. "The Individualized Medicine Clinic represents one of Mayo's bold steps toward realizing the promise of these game-changing technologies and offering new hope to patients, including those with cancer and diagnostic dilemmas."

While the rapidly declining cost of sequencing has been widely heralded and has led to varying degrees of clinical implementation at a handful of health care organizations, managing the sheer volume of data remains a bottleneck to widespread application of personalized medicine.

"Every human disease has a genetic component but, to date, medical providers have not been able to fully utilize this information to improve clinical outcomes," says Dietrich Stephan, Ph.D., founder, president and CEO of SV Bio. "With the SV Bio platform, we've made the translation to a single assay a full human genome with the diagnostics rapidly and precisely happening in silico." The SV Bio process is fully computerized and automated and reduces the time needed for clinically actionable genome interpretation from several weeks to a few minutes and puts the results in the provider's hands at the point of care.

The goal of the collaboration is to unlock the full potential of next-generation sequencing and open these technologies to every patient. SV Bio's turnkey genomics interpretation solutions query a patient's genome at the point of care and distill the biological data into a concise, actionable report that physicians can use to make faster, more informed decisions. Mayo Clinic will provide medical and scientific expertise to help ensure patients receive the maximum benefit.

"We are now able to take data from any next-generation sequencer and determine with clinical grade sensitivity and specificity which variants within a patient's DNA sequence are influencing a disease or condition, and rapidly provide a report for the clinician that is clear and actionable," Dr. Stephan says. "This level of speed, accuracy and integration into the clinical work flow is not only a first for molecular testing, but also a sea change in the application of next-generation sequencing with no compromise of quality in clinical diagnostics."

As part of the collaboration, Mayo Medical Laboratories, the reference laboratory that provides services worldwide, and SV Bio will work together to refine approaches to clinical genome interpretation.

"In our laboratories, we are rapidly adopting and implementing next-generation sequencing as a platform upon which we will be providing cutting-edge genome-based testing," says Franklin Cockerill, M.D., president of Mayo Medical Laboratories. "This collaboration with SV Bio furthers our mission of bringing the latest diagnostic technologies to health care providers around the world."

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Mayo Clinic and SV Bio enter strategic relationship on genome diagnostics and interpretation