Targeted resequencing of cancer-related genes with febit’s Cancer Exon Biochip

Cancer exome study published in Genomics highlights the potential of HybSelect for large scale genomic studies

LEXINGTON, Mass. (USA), and HEIDELBERG, Germany, February 26, 2010
With its latest publication in the field of targeted next generation sequencing, febit sets new standards in large scale genomic studies: the HybSelect technology has been established as a highly scalable method to enrich biologically relevant exome subsets with increased sample numbers. A summary of the study on febit’s website gives an overview of the results. In this Cancer Exome study that has been published in Genomics (Summerer D. et al, Genomics. 2010 Feb 6.), a selective capture and sequencing of cancer-related genes has been demonstrated. The Cancer Exon Biochip contains probes for an exome subset representing 115 genes that have been identified in the Cancer Genome Project of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute as being highly relevant to the onset of various tumor types. The applied HybSelect method provides excellent completeness and uniformity of sequence coverage. This is reflected in the analysis of reference SNPs with a very high sensitivity of up to 93 % and specificity of 98.2 % or higher. Benefitting from the scalability of the Geniom technology, the HybSelect enrichment strategy enables effective adjustment of target sizes and sample numbers. Thus, it allows for analysis of smaller, relevant genomic regions, at the same time involving large cohorts of samples. The HybSelect method efficiently amends technologies involved in large-scale discovery studies such as whole genome or whole exome sequencing, enabling efficient follow-up projects like disease association studies involving massive sample numbers.