NextCODE, University College Dublin's ACoRD Take Aim at Genetic Causes of Autism and Rare Diseases

-- NextCODE capabilities will power ACoRD/UCD leadership in sequence-based diagnostics and large-scale whole-genome discovery efforts in pediatric disorders

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts, July 7, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- NextCODE Health, which puts whole-genome analysis in the hands of clinicians and researchers worldwide, today announced the start of a partnership with the Academic Centre on Rare Diseases (ACoRD) at University College Dublin. ACoRD will use NextCODE solutions to take full advantage of the latest sequencing technologies to improve the diagnosis and understanding of autism and rare diseases. These include NextCODE's Clinical Sequence Analyzer™, to identify causal mutations in families with a range of rare disorders, and Sequence Miner and the GOR™ database infrastructure to mine whole-genome data for novel sequence variants linked to autism spectrum disorders.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140706/124561

"This partnership is key to our strategy of building on ACoRD's reputation in rare genomics to establish ourselves as a centre of excellence in this field," said Dr Sean Ennis, director at ACoRD, UCD School of Medicine and Medical Science. "Sequencing is a powerful means to identify the causes of disease, but it requires the ability to efficiently store and query truly vast amounts of data. NextCODE's system has done this on an unparalleled scale, and can deliver diagnoses on a case-by case basis and enable large-scale discovery efforts."

Dr Ennis and his colleagues work and publish on a range of genetic diseases, with a particular recent focus on autism. He co-founded the Irish Autism Genetics Collaboration and sits on the research committee of the international Autism Genome Project. More recently he established a Research Centre dedicated to studying Rare Genetic Diseases.

"UCD is renowned as both a clinical and research organization, enabling them to exploit the breadth of our system's potential," said Jeffrey Gulcher, MD, PhD, president, CSO and co-founder of NextCODE. "We are very pleased that they have selected our platform to tackle their most challenging cases and to underpin the use of NGS in their ongoing diagnostics and gene discovery programs."

NextCODE puts the world's most proven sequence analysis platform in the hands of clinicians and researchers around the globe, enabling them to use the full power of NGS data to better diagnose and treat disease. Our solutions combine the only whole-genome analysis system proven at scale with access to the largest and most successful clinical genetics reference database in the world. That gives our partners accurate and actionable insights in real time, with the ability to exploit all their NGS data and visualize mutations at base-by-base resolution - right from their desktop. NextCODE is a private company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Visit us on the web at nextcode.com.

Contact:
Edward Farmer
efarmer@nextcode.com
+1-781-775-6206