Illumina has entered an agreement with Mayo Clinic to make advancements in next-generation sequencing technology with the intent to accelerate Mayo’s delivery of genetic and genomic expertise.

Together, the organizations plan to integrate existing services and software tools and employ new, innovative solutions to improve Mayo Clinic’s reporting workflows for researching inherited disease, enabling Illumina to develop an informatics platform and knowledge base that can improve and automate genomic interpretation.

As part of the agreement, Mayo Clinic will implement BaseSpace Clarity LIMS in specific laboratories to provide testing of the tool. BaseSpace Clarity LIMS is a system to provide comprehensive workflow tracking and integration in laboratories. Mayo Clinic will also deploy and provide feedback on its use of BaseSpace Sequence Hub, a cloud-based genomics computing environment for data analysis and management, and BaseSpace Variant Interpreter, a cloud-based interpretation and reporting platform designed to decrease the time and effort required to assess biological insight from genomic data. The software solutions will be piloted by Mayo Clinic to annotate and interpret genetic variants with regard to their potential role in the development and progression of diseases.

“Through this relationship, we will be able to generate large volumes of genomic information, interrogate the data, and then compare it to what’s known about those variants and those genetic aberrations in real time, saving our geneticists time,” said William Morice, II, M.D., Ph.D., chair of Mayo’s Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology and president of Mayo Medical Laboratories. “We are pleased to work with Illumina and to leverage each other’s expertise in genetic sequencing and analysis.”

“Mayo Clinic has been at the forefront of advanced medical research and patient care for a long time,” said Sanjay Chikarmane, senior vice president and general manager of Illumina Enterprise Informatics. “BaseSpace Informatics Suite has the ability to provide a cloud-based software solution that can manage, analyze and interpret data automatically. We’re pleased that our offering will help Mayo Clinic make sense of genomic data faster and more accurately.”