GATC opens up shop in Sweden
opening of a new subsidiary in Stockholm, Sweden, as it widens the
net in Europe.
The firm said the new operations will provide expanded sales and support services in Scandinavia in order to meet growing demand for the company's services in the region, where its customer base is "rapidly expanding". The company already has an existing European presence in Germany, France and England and is able to boast that it is the only sequencing service provider in the world to have all the leading sequencing technologies (SOLiD, GS FLX and Genome Analyzer) available in-house. GATC has been pushing for expansion over the past year, increasing its production capacity from 15.6 to 250 gigabases per year. It also grew its employees from 45 to 62 and said it is continuing its recruitment drive during the first quarter of this year. In November last year, GATC announced the availability of a new human genome sequencing service in a bid to "boost the move towards personalised medicine by sequencing up to 100 genomes by the end of 2010". Peter Pohl, CEO of GATC told Outsourcing-Pharma.com that the company is urging pharma firms to take a closer look at pharmacogenomics in order to move away from the current 'one-size-fits-all approach' to drug development, and move closer to towards "the long-expected promise of personalised medicine." As part of this, the firm aims to further reduce the cost of human genome sequencing from the current cost of around $5m (€3.4m), to be able to offer "a quality dataset for €500", within ten years, "making it a realistic option for pharmaceutical research". GATC said it is the first sequencing company worldwide to offer whole human genome sequencing to industry and academia. "Improved access to genomic data could transform the diagnosis and treatment of cancer," Professor Dr Christof von Kalle from the German National Center for Tumor Diseases, said at the time. "By sequencing and comparing genomes obtained before and after the diagnosis of cancer, researchers can gain a better understanding of the genetic basis of cancer, particularly the role of the previously understudied non-coding regions. There is growing evidence implicating these areas, which comprise 98.5 per cent of the human genome, in the onset and control of cancer." Meanwhile, in January the firm founded another subsidiary company called LifeCode, which is the first web-based information service for the storage and utilisation of biological and medical data for the analysis of genetic codes and protein codes in the EU.
