QCMG establishes Illumina technology as core sequencing platform

Illumina (NASDAQ:ILMN) today announced that the Queensland Centre for Medical Genomics (QCMG), home of Australia's International Cancer Genomics Consortium program, has established Illumina technology as its core sequencing platform in an expanded facility. The QCMG will replace their fleet of SOLiD/5500 systems with three Illumina HiSeq 2500 systems. This new partnership began in April.

"Illumina is pleased to support the QCMG as a leader in Australian genome research. The decision of the QCMG to decommission their SOLiD/5500 systems and standardize on Illumina's 2500 platform for high-throughput next generation sequencing is a strong endorsement of the superior capabilities of the HiSeq platform and will assist the QCMG to progress towards our shared vision of enabling the development of personalized medicine," said Tim Orpin, Vice President of Illumina's Asia Pacific Region. "Illumina is proud of our long-term relationship with the QCMG. We are very excited to see a relationship that was founded on the use of Illumina genotyping arrays evolve to encompass next generation sequencing."

Professor Sean Grimmond, Director of the QCMG and lead for Australia's ICGC efforts, added, "Adopting the HiSeq platform provides us with a much needed 3-4 fold increase in sequencing throughput. We also anticipate the HiSeq2500 upgrades will push this closer to 10 terabases a month in the near future. This change more closely aligns our ongoing efforts with the greater ICGC research community which predominantly uses Illumina platforms."

"The increased sequencing capacity at the QCMG will allow the Australian team to look into new ICGC-related genome sequencing initiatives and also to establish an exome, whole genome and RNA sequencing service for The University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB). Scaling up our sequencing capacity at the IMB will allow us to better facilitate the success of in-house genome, transcriptome and bioinformatics projects."