U.S – Sanigen, a South Korean-based molecular diagnostics and bioinformatics company, has announced that it will become a channel partner (distributor) in the region for Illumina, the world’s leading genome sequencing company.
The partners will work together to deliver Illumina’s Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) platform technology to the food safety and microbiology sector in South Korea.
NGS is a massively parallel sequencing technology that offers ultra-high throughput, scalability, and speed.
“NGS offers an unprecedented opportunity to the food market to improve safety, We are delighted to partner with Sanigen whose deep expertise in this sector will be a driving force in bringing new accurate and rapid tests to the food safety market,” said Gretchen Weightman, Vice President and General Manager for Illumina in Asia Pacific and Japan.
Illumina NGS instruments have been adopted by leading institutions around the globe, both big and small, and are the production platform for many genome centers.
More than 90% of the world’s sequencing data is generated using Illumina instruments.
Sanigen is a specialist food safety company and serves the market with PCR kits and NGS panels.
It also provides NGS analysis entailing sample preparation, sequencing and bioinformatic services for customer samples, based on its well-established foodborne pathogen database.
Sanigen, together with Illumina, is developing NGS panels that can rapidly detect 16 types of foodborne pathogen from around 400 samples.
The panels will be available in the third quarter of the year.
The companies believe that the partnership will accelerate the application of NGS technology to the food safety market, improving safety levels.
With daunting cases of foodborne illnesses taking over the globe, there stands an innate requirement of cost-effective, easy-to-use, and accurate testing methods that ensure the consumer is delivered nothing but the safest food.
According to foodsafetytech it has been estimated that global food pathogen testing market size could potentially surge to US$ 5.5 billion by 2024.
Last year Thermo Scientific expanded its portfolio of foodborne pathogen detection with the launch of the SureTest PCR Assays.
The testing technology is poised to offer various food producers an access to a more holistic range of tests for every step of the analysis process.
