Oxford Regional High-Throughput Sequencing Hub

DNA sequencing has become a common technology in biomedical research, but a lack of capacity in the region is slowing down the rate of discovery. This project provides funding for new, state of the art DNA sequencing machines, and staff to run them and do genetic analysis of the results.

This bid represents a collaboration between three institutions, the University of Oxford (including three embedded MRC Units), the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust (encompassing the Oxford Biomedical Research Centre, BRC), and the MRC Harwell, together with four industrial partners: two of the major technology providers, Illumina and Roche, one of the potential third-generation sequencing platforms, Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT), and a software provider, Genologics. Oxford already runs a high-throughput sequencing (HTS) centre, the largest in the UK outside the Sanger Institute, but most of the capacity in the current centre is committed to specific projects and groups, and there is major unmet demand across the collaborating institutions. This proposal requests funding to build on the existing expertise and create an MRC Regional Sequencing Hub in Oxford, to bring the current activities to substantial and self-sustaining critical mass. Our vision for the hub is to combine advice and technical support for users and potential users with service provision of HTS, and substantial development activity in the technology platforms and supporting bioinformatics, and statistical genetics.