The government-funded Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI, 工研院) and Britain's Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (the Sanger Institute) have formed an alliance to carry out joint research in genetic engineering, an ITRI official said on Saturday.
A memorandum of understanding was signed on Friday by ITRI president Johnsee Lee (李鍾熙) and Sanger Institute's senior researcher Panos Deloukas.
Lee said the alliance would not only accelerate the process of decoding human genes, but may also help establish the use of Taiwan-made genechips within global academic research.
The two-stage cooperation will first apply cell strains of lymphoblastoids to different platforms of biochips to analyze gene expressions and compare efficacy.
In the second stage, the biochips will be used to compare human lung cancer cell strains before and after treatment with Warfarin in order to understand the metabolic aspects of this medicine.
The Sanger Institute -- set up in 1992 in Cambridge -- is a genome research center that specializes in the sequencing and interpretation of human genomes. ITRI holds around 30 biochip technology patents. It helped establish Phalanx Biotech Group (
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