US-based biopharmaceutical company H3 Biomedicine and China-based BGI have entered into collaboration to sequence and publish genomic data from pre-clinical cancer models.
The research will focus on identifying and validating recurrent gene mutations that are potential targets for drug therapies.
H3 Biomedicine president and CEO Markus Warmuth said genomic information generated from patient samples or material derived thereof should be shared with the scientific community.
"As a matter of fact, the community has benefited enormously from collaborative efforts like The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC)," Warmuth added.
H3 and BGI will release the cancer genomic data to the global research community and will jointly analyze the data to deliver a highly curated set of genetically profiled, pre-clinical model information.
As part of the first study, BGI will sequence 250 cancer cell lines via next-generation, whole exome sequencing.
BGI Americas CEO Yingrui Li said, "I believe this partnership will yield significant, valuable genomic information that will lay a solid foundation for developing pre-clinical cancer models and new anticancer drugs to benefit human health."
