Magnis BR
In 2017 Burning Rock entered a partnership with Agilent Technologies to co-develop an IVD system that could help widen patient access to NGS testing across China. The rationale was simple, a sophisticated NGS workflow requires considerable resources that pose issues for hospitals and laboratories alike. The library construction preparation phase is well regarded as the most labor-intensive portion of the NGS workflow, requiring both manual effort and time, apart from being a relatively error-prone step. NGS operators need to be highly trained and a system of coordination must be established to ensure samples are passed along the workflow in a timely manner. The cumbersome nature of NGS workflow can be incredibly difficult for hospitals to manage concurrently with standard pathology proceedings, especially when the number of patients is high. Pairing Burning Rock’s proprietary chemistry with Agilent’s technological expertise, the Magnis BR was conceived with the goal of automating the entire NGS process and providing the China market with the first approved IVD companion diagnostic.
The Magnis BR reduced library construction timelines from 24-36 hours of manual preparation to 9 hours.
Hospitals can now generate full patient reports in only 3 days
The system has a small footprint at only 0.317m^(3), allowing laboratories to save up to 45% in bench space.
The high-throughput sequencing and fully automatic probe capture method for the library construction step dramatically decreases hands on time, and the need for highly skilled operators – saving scientists valuable time.
The Magnis BR was successful in spawning a novel in-hospital channel in China. Currently, the system has been deployed to over 50 hospitals across 13 provinces in the country. The impact of the Magnis is multifaceted and has set the stage for a wide range of changes from both a regulatory and an overall business model perspective. For hospitals, the adoption of the system allows these healthcare institutions to become partners by generating revenue for their testing services. Additionally, the ease of deployment of the Magnis BR allowed for a widening of access to NGS testing in more rural or historically underserved communities, that might not have the capability of internally developing and validating LDTs. Historically, patients who live in rural settings have had disproportionately less access to genetic testing as most clinical studies tend to favor the inclusion of patients that live near large metropolitan cities. The development of IVD systems, like the Magnis BR, that enable numerous laboratory sites to participate in large scale studies could be a large step in ensuring patients of all socioeconomic backgrounds are accounted for in future clinical studies. Additionally, less funded hospitals have historically had issues creating independent bioinformatic pipelines. The incorporation of the Magnis BR system served to standardize the process for data collection across dozens of hospitals, allowing for the generation of meta-data that can further refine a single powerful pipeline. This will in turn result in greater consistency in the therapeutic decision-making process through more accurate molecular characterization due to the standardization of diagnostic criteria.
