Illumina signs initial customer deals for new Global Screening Array

Illumina, Inc. today announced that it has signed deals with 12 customers for its new Infinium^® Global Screening Array (GSA). In total, the company has received orders for more than 3 million samples of the new consortia-developed array. Initial customers include human disease researchers at The Broad Institute and deCODE Genetics, health systems Avera Health, Codigo46, Diagnomics, Eone Diagnomics Genome Center (EDGC), Sanford Health and UCLA Health System, genomic service providers Centre National de Genotypage, Erasmus, Life and Brain, and consumer genomics company 23andMe, Inc.

“The array content includes highly predictive hand-curated content, as well as high value markers for translational research applications and sample quality control (QC) designed to be useful across a broad range of applications, populations, and diseases,” said Benjamin Neale, PhD, Assistant Professor, Analytic and Translational Genetics Unit, Massachusetts General Hospital and The Broad Institute, who led the predictive content selection for the consortia.

“We were impressed that the GSA included content applicable to a range of clinical research activities across our healthcare ecosystem. For the moment, this is an exceptional research opportunity,” said Dan Geschwind, MD, PhD, Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Professor in Neurology, Psychiatry and Human Genetics and Senior Associate Dean and Associate Vice Chancellor for Precision Medicine, at UCLA. “As genetics and genomics becomes incorporated into clinical practice in the future, we expect to be able to use these data to make the care that we deliver in UCLA health more personalized.”

The GSA is a highly economical tool for genetic risk screening of large global populations. With volume discounts enabling price points below $40 per sample, it offers unparalleled genomic coverage and imputation performance across 26 continental populations and features approximately 50,000 hand-curated variants relevant to clinical research including markers for pharmacogenomics, newborn screening research, risk profiling, and confirmation of putative clinical associations. Leveraging the 24-sample Infinium format, the array includes 660,000 markers, and allows for the cost-effective addition of up to 50,000 custom markers.

“The early adoption of the GSA, represented by these deals, illustrates the widespread market demand for genotyping products and the continued relevance of arrays in human disease and translational research,” said Rob Brainin, Vice President and General Manager, Applied Genomics at Illumina. “We expect that the value of the content on this array will lead to widespread use in clinical research, including precision medicine programs, predictive risk screening, large scale genome-wide association studies, and in biobank sample characterization and quality control.”

The GSA will begin shipping in the second half of 2016. Orders received to date occurred in the first half of 2016.