Illumina is launching the Infinium HD FFPE Restore Kit, a product that has been long awaited by the cancer research and pathology community. The Infinium HD FFPE Restore Kit enables researchers to repair damaged DNA and perform whole-genome genotyping on highly degraded formalin-fixed and paraffin embedded samples that up to now have been largely unusable to produce high-quality data. Genotyping is performed on two enabled Illumina beadchips: the Human CytoSNP-FFPE and HumanOmniExpress-FFPE.
Millions of FFPE archival cancer tissue samples hold an enormous and invaluable repository of information for cancer research, since they include extensive data for the discovery of biomarkers, drug development, and diagnosis and treatment of diseases. However, the process of fixation and storage of these samples commonly leads to the degradation of DNA, unpredictable modification of DNA bases, and high-levels of DNA crosslinking. This corrupted DNA results in reduced performance for genotyping studies. The Illumina FFPE DNA restoration kits overcome these problems and open up a wide range of new research possibilities especially in the cancer field. FFPE samples contain a wealth of information for the cancer research community as they typically have a significant amount of phenotypic information. In early testing, internal studies have been able to recover up 80-90% of FFPE samples for genotyping on our FFPE enabled beadchips.
