Illumina, Inc. Technology Uncovers Genetic Risk Factors Associated with Prostate Cancer and Lou Gehrig’s Disease

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ: ILMN) today announced that scientists from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and their partners in the Cancer Genetic Markers of Susceptibility (CGEMS) initiative identified a specific single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), rs6983267, that strongly correlates to the development of prostate cancer, a disease that more than 218,000 men in the United States will be diagnosed with this year. This SNP, in addition to a different genetic variant previously found by NCI researchers could explain why as many as 25 percent of prostate cancer cases develop in white men. Stephen Chanock, M.D., Director of the NCI’s Core Genotyping Facility in the Advanced Technology Center and his team detected the most recent genetic variation using the Company’s Infinium® HumanHap300 and HumanHap240S BeadChips. Accepted by Nature Genetics for publication, this study appeared online April 1, 2007.
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