The Singapore National Precision Medicine Program will sequence 10,000 genomes in a collaboration with Oxford Nanopore Technologies with a view to better understanding local genetic diversity.
Precision Health Research, Singapore (PRECISE) runs the National Program and have set up the collaboration to develop a database of genetic structural variants across the three main population groups in Singapore, namely, people of Chinese, Malay and Indian ancestry.
Structural variants can be behind conditions such as Charcot-Marie Tooth disease. Detecting most structural variants is not possible with standard short read genetic sequencing, but Oxford Nanopore’s long read technology allows these types of disease-associated mutations and others to be characterized.
PRECISE was set up in 2020 to help make the Singaporean government’s precision medicine strategy a reality. The first stage set up a Singaporean reference database of 10,000 genomes and established industry partnerships.
The second phase of the National Precision Medicine program began in 2021 and has the aim of sequencing the genomes of 100,000 healthy Singaporean people and 50,000 people with different diseases. This stage of the project also aims to set up pilot precision medicine implementation projects in the region and collect and organize relevant genomic data so it can be easily integrated with electronic health records in the future.
To implement phase II of the program, PRECISE will work together with the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, the National Healthcare Group and National University Health System, National University of Singapore, and the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre, as well as industry partners like Oxford Nanopore.
The Oxford Nanopore collaboration recently started, as part of phase II of the program, and will run for 12 months. It will use the company’s high-output PromethION 48 sequencing machines to sequence the genomes of 10,000 individuals participating in the PRECISE-SG100K population cohort and will ensure the Malay, Indian, and Chinese communities in Singapore are all well represented. The Oxford Nanopore technology is fast and allows short and long read DNA and RNA sequencing at scale, as well as detection of epigenetic methylation markers.
“We are excited to collaborate with Singapore’s National Precision Medicine program to create one of the most extensive and inclusive reference genome datasets globally,” said Gordon Sanghera, CEO of Oxford Nanopore, in a press statement. “This collaboration not only enhances our commitment to precision healthcare but also strategically positions Singapore as a pivotal hub for genomics in the Asia Pacific.”
