NEW YORK - Oxford Nanopore Technologies and Danaher subsidiary Cepheid have formed a strategic collaboration to develop and commercialize an automated infectious disease sequencing workflow, the firms announced Wednesday.
Following a recently completed proof-of-concept study, the collaboration will now leverage the Cepheid GeneXpert system for pre-sequencing sample and library preparation along with ONT's sequencers, the firms said in a statement.
The partners said they will create a scalable, automated, end-to-end nanopore sequencing workflow for bacterial and fungal pathogen whole-genome sequencing from culture isolates.
The new solution is intended to be for research use only in a range of settings, including labs that have not previously had the expertise to conduct sequencing in-house, and will yield infectious disease analysis results within hours.
The companies are also developing a workflow for positive blood cultures and said that the collaboration may also expand from infectious diseases to other use cases, such as cancer and human genetics, and ultimately to regulatory-approved clinical diagnostics.
The workflow will also be compatible with a range of third-party informatics tools, the firms said, including Oxford Nanopore's EPI2ME and other solutions in the firm's compatible provider network. Cepheid will also directly offer an informatics solution, which will be commercialized by way of a license from an unnamed industry player. This informatics platform provides pathogen identification, antimicrobial resistance gene detection, SNP-based clonality for outbreak tracking and surveillance, and AI-driven genotypic antimicrobial susceptibility predictions, the firms said.
"Combining the ease of use of the GeneXpert system, the most widely placed PCR diagnostic instrument worldwide, with Oxford Nanopore's unique sequencing platform unlocks a richness of biomarker data that has historically been technically challenging for many labs to access," Vitor Rocha, president of Cepheid, said in a statement.
"Providing an integrated solution to more effectively characterize infectious diseases, understand the epidemiology of bacterial outbreaks, and profile antimicrobial resistance will meaningfully accelerate our mission of expanding access to critical molecular information," Rocha added.
Oxford Nanopore CEO Gordon Sanghera added in a statement that the collaboration is "an important step forward in delivering new and improved workflow options to better understand infectious diseases."
Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.