CAP TODAY Pathology/Laboratory Medicine/Laboratory Management
March 2014—Qiagen last year enrolled molecular diagnostics laboratories in an early access program to complete the development of a Web-based solution to deliver faster, easier-to-use, and high-confidence clinical interpretation and reporting of observed gene variants in data from NGS-based tests. A larger beta program will launch soon. Interested laboratories can learn more at http://wptest.ingenuity.com/ngs-clinical-beta.
Qiagen also announced the formation of the Ingenuity Scientific Advisory Board, comprising health care and academic leaders in medical genetics, genomics, and bioinformatics. This board will advise and assist the company in research and product development initiatives focused on clinical applications.
The interpretation and reporting solution draws upon clinical and genomic data in the expert-curated Ingenuity Knowledge Base. It will be the first product in the Ingenuity portfolio that is designed to address the major challenges of scale, speed, and decision support that laboratories face with the adoption of NGS-based applications. The time required to make accurate clinical assessments of variants—especially as tests move from single-gene to multiple-gene to panels, exomes, and whole genomes—is becoming a fundamental bottleneck and slowing the adoption of these data in clinical applications. The solution will provide clinical labs with automated scoring, interpretation, and reporting of findings in standardized, HIPAA Safe Harbor–compliant formats.
Early access program members include leading commercial and academic testing labs such as Emory Genetics Laboratory, GeneDx, LabCorp, Partners Healthcare, and Quest Diagnostics. These collaborators provided important input into the development of the Ingenuity solution.