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| Rick Klausner, Illumina's chief medical officer |
Amid growing efforts to quell the deadly Ebola outbreak, diagnostic giant Illumina ($ILMN) is teaming up with U.S. government officials and Broad Institute researchers to help scientists in West Africa track the virus in real time and develop new tools to prevent its spread.
As Reuters reports, the San Diego, CA-based company will work with researchers at Harvard University's Broad Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and USAID to create sequencing and patient monitoring facilities in Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and eventually other West African countries that serve as hubs for mobile laboratories. Illumina did not disclose financial details, but plans to train and outfit the facilities with its state-of-the art genome sequencing technology, MiSeq, allowing for improved genomic screening.
"This is an urgent situation that needs our immediate attention," Illumina's Chief Medical Officer Rick Klausner said in a statement. "Illumina's MiSeq sequencing platform, with turnaround times of 4-24 hours, will provide high-throughput capacity for the analysis of heavy sample loads."
The public-private partnership extends current research, as scientists led by Pardis Sabeti from the Broad Institute have already been training teams in Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone to use sequencing and diagnostic technology, Reuters reports. Under Illumina and Broad researchers' new partnership, scientists can now do similar work in Liberia, the country hit hardest by the outbreak.
Labs in Nigeria and Senegal are slated to receive Illumina's MiSeq desktop sequencers first, followed by labs in Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to the Reuters story.
Illumina is not the only med tech company getting in on the effort. Last month, Cepheid snagged a $3.3 million cash infusion from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop its rapid Ebola test. The company's "Xpert Ebola" tool can diagnose the virus in an hour or less using saliva or a drop of blood and runs on its molecular diagnostic system already in use in developing countries to identify drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis.
Colorado-based Corgenix ($CONX) is also hard at work on its Ebola diagnostic tool, which functions similarly to a home pregnancy test and delivers results within minutes on a testing strip. The company won nearly $3 million in funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health in June to accelerate R&D for its rapid Ebola test.
- here's Illumina's statement
- read the Reuters story