CAMBRIDGE, MA – Knome Inc., the human genome interpretation company, announced today that it has been selected by Illumina, Inc., (NASDAQ: ILMN) as a partner in the Illumina Genome Network (IGN). As part of the agreement, IGN customers will have access to preferential pricing for Knome’s genome interpretation tools and services. The agreement also calls for the companies to further integrate their data pipelines in order to provide end users with accelerated turnaround times.

“Knome’s software tools and services, knomeBASE and knomeDISCOVERY, are well positioned to help address the needs of Illumina’s customers,” said Scott Kahn, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Illumina. “IGN will provide fully processed and summarized genomic information from its whole genome and cancer analysis services directly to Knome, which will use the data to deliver subsequent interpretations. These reports include comprehensive annotation and interactive analyses that are very attractive to users with little or no in-house bioinformatics expertise, and to those who want to perform multi-sample analysis.”

“We have often worked together on a case-by-case basis to provide researchers with a complete sequencing and interpretation solution—the most recent example being the landmark 1,000 genomes asthma study by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine,” said Ari Kiirikki, Knome’s Vice President of Business Development. “Now that we have entered into a formal partnership, we look forward to working together to proactively identify researchers, drug developers, and clinics with interpretation bottlenecks in order to deliver a seamless end-to-end solution.”