With Peter Kim, PhD, the president and EVP of Merck & Co. Inc.'s Merck Research Laboratories in attendance, in mid-September BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute) announced the signing of a statement of intent to form a working relationship with Merck. The organizations aim to utilize BGI's high-throughput DNA sequencing and analysis capabilities as the underpinning of a research collaboration, primarily to analyze genomic and epigenetic data generated using Merck samples.
The announcement was more than just a shot across the bow signaling publicly BGI's intentions to dominate the gene sequencing...