By Clinical Informatics News Staff

October 6, 2015 | WuXi NextCODE today announced a long-term agreement with Sidra Medical and Research Center in Qatar. The two groups plan to co-develop comprehensive research and bioinformatics programs that will link with the Qatari national electronic medical record system.

Among other projects, Sidra is involved in the Qatar Genome Project said Dr Francesco Marincola, Sidra’s Chief Research Officer, in a statement. The QGP is a nationwide initiative launched by Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser at the World Innovation Summit for Health 2013. Its aim is to generate genome sequence and molecular ’omics data on the Qatari population and link it to the electronic medical record (EMR) system to help chart a road map for future advanced health care through personalized medicine.

Sidra has assembled an “impressive” group of informaticians, clinicians and researchers from around the world said Hannes Smarason, co-founder, President and COO of WuXi NextCODE. Sidra and WuXi NextCODE will first deploy the NextCODE system and GOR database, and then work closely to “joint develop projects as they understand their needs,” Smarason told Clinical Informatics News.

In partnership with Qatar Biobank, another key institution in the QGP, Sidra is currently aiming to complete the pilot phase by May 2016. A whole-genome pilot of the Qatari population with a sample size of 3,000—using the Wuxi NextCODE system—is already underway.

Marincola believes that WuXi NextCODE’s bioinformatics system will help Sidra ramp up sequencing efforts, and build a global standard database and tools using population genomic and medical data to benefit research and clinical care.

This won’t be NextCODE’s first population-wide sequencing project. NextCODE’s roots lie in Iceland, originally part of deCODE genetics, and the NextCODE platform was instrumental deCODE’s Icelandic sequencing project. In many ways, Iceland and Qatar are similar, said Hannes Smarason, co-founder, President and COO of WuXi NextCODE.

“[Iceland and Qatar] each has a population of about 300,000, which is a kind of Goldilocks size for doing cutting-edge genomics: it's small enough that you can efficiently draw on an entire population without selection bias, and large enough that your findings will be relevant to rest of the world,” Smarason said.  

“In the context of genomics projects, Iceland's is far and away the biggest ever done in terms of sheer numbers, and so our technology, the only that has been tested at that scale, is a logical and proven choice. In a more general sense, too, there are all sorts of advantages to working in a manageably sized and geographically defined cohort. For example, Qatar has a single national EMR system, so that it is relatively simple both to integrate sequence data with health data, which is the basic task of using genomics in healthcare for any application.”

WuXi NextCODE and Sidra plan to develop needed solutions as the partnership progresses, though Smarason doesn’t know exactly what those may be. “These might include APIs and other applications for joining Cerner EMR data with WGS data; incorporating older/other types of genomic data like microarray and genotype data seamlessly into our GOR architecture; and applications to manage the complexities of enabling people to participate securely in a range of research using some or all of their healthcare data,” he said. “None of these are challenges specific to Qatar, so their solution built on our architecture will be useful to all of our users worldwide.”