Qiagen launches clinical bioinformatics platform for sequencing applications

Qiagen has announced the launch of a new bioinformatics content and software platform for next-generation sequencing called Qiagen Clinical Insight.

Designed to help clinical testing labs to interpret and report on genomic variants identified in next-generation sequencing, the platform will be demonstrated at events such as the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting and the European Society of Human Genetics Conference.

The evidence-based decision support solution evaluates genomic variants in the context of published biomedical literature, professional association guidelines, publicly available databases and annotations, drug labels and clinical trials. 

It is instrument and assay-agnostic and currently supports both somatic and germline testing, with the first two supported applications to be in the field of oncology for somatic and hereditary cancer testing.

Dr Laura Furmanski, head of Qiagen's bioinformatics business area, said: "Qiagen Clinical Insight is the most comprehensive, scalable bioinformatics platform for clinical labs to use in interpretation and reporting of genomic variants from next-generation sequencing data."

Earlier this month, the company announced a new technology sharing partnership with BGI, the world's largest genomics organisation, to further strengthen its product offerings in this field.