QIAGEN Launches NGS Clinical Insights Platform
By Bio-IT World Staff
May 27, 2015 | Yesterday afternoon QIAGEN announced the commercial launch of QIAGEN Clinical Insight (QCI), a bioinformatics content and software platform for clinical testing labs to interpret and report on genomic variants identified in next-generation sequencing (NGS). The first two supported applications for the bioinformatics platform are in oncology, for somatic and hereditary cancer testing.
The Clinical Insight platform is an evidence-based decision support solution that evaluates genomic variants in the context of published biomedical literature, professional association guidelines, publicly-available databases and annotations, drug labels and clinical trials. Using a powerful software platform, the secure QCI web application and QIAGEN’s private data center, clinicians can rapidly classify variants, identify treatment options and perform geographical clinical trial matching.
QCI is instrument- and assay-agnostic and currently supports both somatic and germline testing. It also provides access to the Allele Frequency Community, the world’s largest repository of ancestral and ethnic diversity data.
“We gathered input from more than 100 clinical testing labs and worked with 50 of them to evaluate the QCI content and software in their workflows for laboratory-developed tests,” said Laura Furmanski, head of QIAGEN’s bioinformatics business area, in the company’s announcement. Early testers Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and Emory University School of Medicine were pleased with QCI’s offering.
“Getting from raw sequencing data to accurate and timely curation of clinically actionable variants and reporting in a user friendly format for our ordering physicians continues to be a significant challenge for complex molecular testing,” said Gregory J. Tsongalis, Director of the Molecular Pathology and Translational Research Program at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. “Working in collaboration with QIAGEN on the development and validation of QIAGEN’s new Clinical Insight platform in support of somatic cancer testing has resulted in scalable and reproducible results in addressing our labs unmet bioinformatics needs and challenges. We look forward to continued validation work with QIAGEN and realizing the full potential of the Clinical Insight platform.”
Dr. Madhuri Hegde, Professor of Human Genetics at the Emory University School of Medicine and Executive Director of the Emory Genetics Laboratory (EGL), said: “QCI supports both germline and somatic test indication which is important to labs offering diverse test indications. And it provides full platform and assay agnostic interpretation and reporting workflow support which enables clinical testing labs to reduce time and cost associated with NGS based testing.”
Since late 2013, QIAGEN has integrated several bioinformatics tools and solutions from Ingenuity Systems, CLC bio and BIOBASE for the analysis, interpretation and reporting of biological data.
