Boston Children’s, Life Technologies Form Genetic Testing Venture

In a second major foray into genomics by a major New England provider in recent weeks, Boston Children’s Hospital has formed a company to develop new molecular tests and related products. Children’s has entered into a deal with Carlsbad, Calif.-based Life Technologies Corp. to form Claritas Genomics. The deal, which was announced at last month’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, comes on the heels of an announcement by Boston-based hospital operator Partners Healthcare that it planned to offer whole-genomic sequencing and testing to its patients. Exact terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but Children’s will be a majority owner of the new entity, with most of the testing taking place on its campus. The hospital will integrate its existing genetic diagnostic lab into Claritas. That lab currently performs more than 100 types of genetic tests. “Boston Children’s has already invested significantly to accelerate genomic discovery for patients with rare diseases, cancer, and autism and to profile individual responses to medications. We now have a practical paradigm for taking genetic and genomic research discoveries to the bedside, and we’re excited to be able to scale up and offer this capability to patients everywhere,” said David Margulies, M.D., executive director of the Gene Partnership at Boston Children’s Hospital. “Through a set of network collaborations and via electronic communications, we plan to provide interpretive services around the world.” In addition to the partnership with Life Technologies, Boston Children’s plans to develop relationships with other children’s hospitals in the United States and in other nations in order to share data. Claritas will also work to validate what officials say is the “clinical utility” of the Ion Proton Sequencer, a genome sequencer Life Technologies introduced last year that is about the size of a toaster oven and can sequence an entire human genome in one day for about $1,000. Although it has had sales to several large universities and to researchers in Australia and Korea, it is still not being widely utilized at hospitals in the United States. The instrument will be used to develop new tests by Claritas’s researchers. “While a number of academic and private ventures are offering genomic sequencing and molecular diagnostics to the public, no other partnership has integrated all the elements—fast, accurate genomic sequencing, bioinformatics, CLIA expertise, and access to researchers and clinicians who can interpret the data in a meaningful way,” said Sandra Fenwick, Boston Children’s president and chief operating officer.