November 2nd, 2011, Shenzhen, China - BGI, the world's largest genomic organization, today announced its participation and pivotal role in demonstrating the superior performance of RNA-Seq in predicting patient outcomes as part of the Sequencing Quality Control (SEQC) Project launched by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The SEQC, also known as MAQC-III, is the third phase of the MicroArray Quality Control (MAQC), aimed at assessing the technical performance of next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms for RNA and DNA analyses.
Microarrays were expected to be a primary source for pharmacogenomic and toxicogenomic data, but its progress has been hampered due to concerns on the lack of reproducibility and accuracy of the derived data. Recently, more and more scientists have been gradually conducting pharmaceutical and medical studies by utilizing NGS technology for advancing personalized nutrition and medicine. In late 2008, FDA turned its attention to sequencing technology and issued a statement calling for volunteers to participate in SEQC.
With the rapid development of NGS technology, RNA-Seq, also known as "Whole Transcriptome Shotgun Sequencing," is being adopted by the biomedical research community and FDA-regulated industries because of its potential for higher sensitivity in detecting low expression genes and greater specificity in distinguishing isoforms, among other advantages. To demonstrate the utility of RNA-Seq technology in predicting patient outcomes, the FDA, BGI and the University Children's Hospital of Cologne have been conducting together a study of cancer prognosis to assess the performance of RNA-Seq and microarrays using 500 neuroblastoma samples from MAQC-II.
In this project, BGI performs sequence library construction and sequencing as well as bioinformatics analysis for the massive amount of data being produced. "With our rich experience in RNA-Seq research, we believe we can make a significant contribution to the development of RNA-Seq technology and help accelerate its translation to clinical application," said Dr. Zhiyu Peng, Vice President of Research & Cooperation Division at BGI.
Dr. Matthias Fischer from the University Children's Hospital of Cologne stated, "While we have built predictive models for neuroblastoma patients with microarray data, some of those still need to be improved. Compared with microarray, the resulting massive RNA-Seq sequence data could be utilized to better understand human transcriptomics and identify functional genetic variants associated with disease and drug risks."
About MAQC and SEQC
The MAQC (MicroArray Quality Control) Project was initiated by the U.S. FDA in 2005, with an aim to assess the technical performance of the new technology in pharmacogenomics and toxicogenomics. The MAQC project is helping improve the technology and foster its proper application in discovery, development and review of FDA regulated products by providing large reference datasets along with readily accessible reference RNA samples. (http://www.fda.gov/MicroArrayQC/). Results from the first phase of the MAQC project regarding microarray data reproducibility and data analysis were published in 2006 as six research papers in Nature Biotechnology (http://www.nature.com/nbt/focus/maqc/). MAQC-II extensively evaluated common practices for the development and validation of microarray-based classification models with the goal of predicting toxicological and clinical endpoints, and some results of MAQC-II were published in 2010 in Nature Biotechnology and The Pharmacogenomics Journal (www.nature.com/focus/maqc2). The SEQC is a continuation of the MAQC project.
About BGI
BGI was founded in Beijing, China on September 9th, 1999 with the mission of being a premier scientific partner to the global research community. The goal of BGI is to make leading-edge genomic science highly accessible through its investment in infrastructure that leverages the best available technology, economies of scale, and expert bioinformatics resources. BGI, and its affiliates, BGI Americas and BGI Europe, have established partnerships and collaborations with leading academic and government research institutions as well as global biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, supporting a variety of disease, agricultural, environmental, and related applications.
BGI has established a proven track record of excellence, delivering results with high efficiency and accuracy for innovative, high-profile research which has generated over 170 publications in top-tier journals such as Nature and Science. These accomplishments include sequencing one percent of the human genome for the International Human Genome Project, contributing 10 percent to the International Human HapMap Project, carrying out research to combat SARS and German deadly E. coli, playing a key role in the Sino-British Chicken Genome Project, and completing the sequence of the rice genome, the silkworm genome, the first Asian diploid genome, the potato genome, and, most recently, 1000 genomes and human Gut metagenome.
For more information about BGI, please visit www.genomics.cn
Contact Information:
Zhiyu Peng
Vice President of Research & Cooperation Division
BGI
pengzhiyu@genomics.cn
www.genomics.cn
Bicheng Yang
Public Communication Officer
BGI
+86-755-82639701
yangbicheng@genomics.cn
www.genomics.cn