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| WuXi NextCODE co-founder and COO Hannes Thor Smárason |
Building on a partnership in place, WuXi NextCODE will provide genetic testing services for the Children's Hospital of Fudan University in Shanghai.
The company and Fudan University announced an enterprise partnership in June as part of an effort of Chinese academic bodies researching genetics and developmental biology.
The services to the hospital, CHFU, mark the first clinical application of WuXi NextCODE's sequencing technology in China, the company said in a release.
Genetic sequencing in China has seen official support and this month Boston-based Veritas Genetics announced an R&D center in China's Hangzhou Economic & Technological Development Area aimed at genomic screening and testing product development for an Asian population.
For WuXi NextCODE, a unit of WuXi PharmaTech ($WX), which is slated to delist from the U.S. in a management-led $3.3 billion buyout, the deal opens up a significant access to use its genome and whole exome sequencing platforms across diseases in China that are now offered abroad.
"CHFU will be able to offer Chinese rare disease patients the same sequence-based diagnostics now available to patients in the United States and Europe through partners including Boston Children's Hospital and Genomics England," the company said in the release. "CHFU, which sees as many as 7,000 patients every day, can now rapidly scale up sequence-based testing to resolve more undiagnosed cases."
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
- here's the release