Korea is utilizing only a fraction of the potential of next generation sequencing (NGS) and has yet to recognize the full value of the platform, Illumina's sales head for the Asia region said.
"Korea should make efforts to let the public know the cost-effectiveness of NGS in reducing medical costs," said Rob McBride, Illumina's head of sales in Asia Pacific and Japan, during a press conference celebrating the launch of NovaSeq X Series in Korea on Wednesday.
NovaSeq X is a new production-scale sequencer that will drastically shorten the sequencing time and generate more than 20,000 whole genomes per year, enabling a more sustainable sequencing.
According to McBride, countries including the U.S., China, the U.K., and Singapore, are already conducting population-scale sequencing using Illumina's technology. He urged Korea to participate in the global trend.
The U.S. is conducting a research called "All of Us," which aims to speed up health research discoveries and enable new kinds of individualized healthcare, with a million participants, McBride noted.
China is conducting "One Million Whole Genome Sequencing Project," which aims to establish three genetic databases specific to the Chinese population, he said. "In Korea, the company is also making efforts to reduce the cost and period of NGS and lower the entry barrier for genome testing and to generalize genome sequencing."
McBride predicted that more diseases will be cured in the upcoming genomic era.
He stressed that the demand for oncology genomic analysis solutions had increased significantly.
"Therefore, we believe that NovaSeq X series will play a big role in Korea as major Korean hospitals are well known for analyzing a lot of genomic information," McBride said.
During the presentation, McBride also provided insight into the newly launched NovaSeq X Series.
"With the NovaSeq X Series, Illumina redesigned every dimension of its world-class sequencers to further increase speed, scale, accuracy, and sustainability," McBride said. "NovaSeq X Series implements a new sequencing through synthesis (SBS) chemistry engineered for two times the higher speed and accuracy and highest-resolution optics and ultra-high density flow cells, delivering 2.5 times greater throughput while driving down sequencing costs."
The series also integrates an on-board DRAGEN Bio-IT with original read archive (ORA) compression, enabling highly accurate and fully automated secondary analysis with five times lossless data compression, he added.
McBride explained that the company has also developed 15 types of heat-resistant reagents that can be transported at room temperature, which eliminates the need for dry ice, greatly reducing waste.
"We expect to reduce the amount of dry ice by 630,000 tons a year," McBride said. "In addition, the NovaSeq X series minimized environmental impact by reducing the weight of packaging waste by 90 percent and plastic usage by 50 percent."