QIAGEN announced a collaboration with the McGill University Centre for Microbiome Research to support microbiome research activities and outcomes.
The three-year partnership will further drive microbiome sciences – the study of a community of microorganisms that can be found living together in any environment, including the human body. It will focus on key areas such as DNA extraction from low microbial biomass samples and anaerobic culturing protocols.
The collaboration is expected to strengthen QIAGEN’s presence in microbiome research across North America which represents a $1.8 billion market. It also will help to gain a deeper understanding of the needs of the scientific community for studying the function of vast microbial ecosystems and how they can be shaped to improve health and mitigate disease. QIAGEN will support the McGill Centre for Microbiome Research with reagents for research across a variety of microbiology and genomic processing workflows and contribute to joint research projects demonstrating the suitability of QIAGEN products for microbiome science. The collaboration will also enable the McGill Centre for Microbiome Research to better train the next generation of scientists and to make microbiome research accessible to a wider range of scientific domains.
“Partnering with McGill University, a leading institution known for its outstanding research and educational programs, underscores our commitment to advancing microbiome research,” said Nitin Sood, Senior Vice President and Head of the Life Sciences Business Area at QIAGEN. “This collaboration will enhance our ability to develop new microbiome solutions based on customer feedback and support the scientific community in uncovering new insights into the microbiome’s impact on health and disease.”
“Microbial communities are central to the functioning of every known ecosystem, including the human body. Yet, we are only scratching the surface in understanding how these abundant, incredibly diverse and dynamic communities impact human health and ecosystems at large. This exciting partnership with QIAGEN will help us provide the tools and approaches to microbiome researchers at McGill University and from all around the province of Quebec to keep pushing the boundaries of our knowledge” said Corinne Maurice, PhD, co-director of the McGill Centre for Microbiome Research and Canada Research Chair in Gut Microbial Interactions.
Microbiome research aims to explore the relationships between microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi and viruses, and their hosts. It can help to better understand the microbiome’s impact on health, disease, and microbial ecological processes to develop novel diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. QIAGEN products will be used in the experimental platforms of the McGill Centre for Microbiome Research, and the Centre will also function as a beta-testing site for the development of new QIAGEN products for microbiome applications and to refine and optimize these for broader applications in the scientific community.
The partnership further drives QIAGEN’s strategy to advance microbiome research. At the beginning of 2024, the company announced a partnership with Penn State University in the United States to create a shared research and education facility for the fast-developing microbiome sciences. It aims to investigate research opportunities that address challenges and research gaps facing the microbiome.
McGill University is one of the top research universities globally. The McGill Centre for Microbiome Research provides McGill investigators and their partners with infrastructure and resources to generate evidence-based knowledge for the benefit of medicine and public health. The Centre aims to integrate and synergize microbiome research activities by offering services through two distinct, yet complementary experimental platforms housed at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (Gnotobiotic Animal Research platform) and downtown campus (Microbial Services Platform).
The Gnotobiotic Animal Research Platform investigates the effects of specific microbial taxa and communities on health and how microbial communities can be modified for improved health. The Microbial Services Platform provides experimental design services and specializes in sample processing for sequencing, as well as culturomics under anaerobic conditions, key steps to assess microbial content and identify key microbes, including pathogens, associated with health and disease.
The McGill Centre for Microbiome Research is dedicated to understanding the complex interactions between microbial communities and their hosts and is committed to make microbiome research accessible to a wide range of scientific domains in Montreal.
QIAGEN’s comprehensive microbiome portfolio encompasses tools for every aspect of the scientific workflow, including reliable sample preparation kits optimized for investigating challenging samples from environmental and human microbiomes. To ensure reproducibility, QIAGEN offers sample preparation automation for standardization and reliability. The extensive range of microbiome solutions also includes downstream processing technologies such as NGS, digital PCR (dPCR), or quantitative PCR (qPCR), all complemented by robust bioinformatics tools for seamless digital analysis.