Regeneron Pharmaceuticals said today its wholly owned Regeneron Genetics Center (RGC) subsidiary has formed research collaborations with three academic institutions that involve Mendelian family-based genetics research.
The RGC will partner with Columbia University Medical Center to study the genetic basis of familial diseases, such as inherited cardiometabolic diseases, familial cancer predisposition and rare genetic diseases.
The Regeneron subsidiary also said it will join with the Clinic for Special Children to study the genetic basis of early onset and familial forms of pediatric disorders in Amish and Mennonite populations; and team up with Baylor College of Medicine to study the function of Mendelian disease genes discovered by the Baylor Center for Mendelian Genomics.
Regeneron said the new collaborations are designed to build on the RGC’s existing partnerships with the Undiagnosed Diseases Program of NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute’s (NHGRI), as well as with the Geisinger Health System in large-scale family- and population-based genetics research.
“These scientific collaborations represent the RGC’s continued expansion into important areas of human genetics research,” George Yancopoulos, M.D., Ph.D., founding scientist, president of Regeneron Laboratories, and CSO, said in a statement.
The RGC’s primary goal is to improve patient outcomes by identifying novel drug targets, clinical indications for development programs, and genomic biomarkers for pharmacogenomic applications. The center’s fully integrated genomics program is designed to span early gene discovery and functional genomics, as well as facilitate drug development by using various sequencing and analytical approaches.
According to Regeneron, the RGC has sequenced de-identified samples from more than 10,000 individuals, and has applied fully-automated sample preparation and data processing as well as cloud-based informatics to achieve throughput of more than 50,000 unique samples per year.
