GE Healthcare to provide sequencing services to Karolinska Institutet

GE Healthcare has won a new tender to exclusively provide next-generation sequencing services to a research group at Sweden's prestigious Karolinska Institutet.

Texas-based GE Healthcare subsidiary SeqWright Genomic Services will provide nucleic acid sequencing and other genomic services to the Karolinska Institutet as it carries out efforts to identify mutations and genetic variants associated with metastatic breast cancer.

This large cohort study will be conducted using tissue samples provided by Karolinska Institutet and analysed using GE Healthcare technology, with the aim of determining new predictive markers for metastatic disease.

It comes as part of wider efforts by GE to aid the development of clinical and companion diagnostics, which have the potential to revolutionise the way healthcare decisions are made.

Ger Brophy, chief technology officer for life sciences at GE Healthcare, said: "Understanding how genetic variations at the molecular level affect disease is critical to the discovery and development of new and more effective therapies for complex diseases such metastatic breast cancer."

Last month, the company attended the American Society for Radiation Oncology meeting in Atlanta, where it demonstrated its latest imaging technology advances.