December 2014—To support users focused on hereditary disease, Qiagen has fully integrated Biobase HGMD Professional with Ingenuity Variant Analysis so that researchers no longer require a separate human gene mutation database license. The Ingenuity Variant Analysis is a Web-based software application that filters genetic variants in a secure, private, cloud-based environment to identify variants most likely to cause disease. HGMD provides comprehensive data on human inherited disease mutations and is used in human genetics research, diagnostics, and personal genomics applications. Through this integration, users can use ethnicity inference to simplify data-set groupings and to identify variants associated with target traits, such as high cholesterol or physical traits, at no additional cost.
Users of Qiagen’s CLC Cancer Research Workbench will now be able to detect copy number variations and variants from RNA-sequencing data, which can be further analyzed using Ingenuity Variant Analysis for causal variant identification. The company has also developed the “FastQ-to-insight solution,” which integrates the CLC Cancer Research Workbench directly with Ingenuity Variant Analysis. The workbench plug-in allows users to identify and interpret somatic cancer driver mutations with one click and to visualize the results in both products to identify and validate the best candidates.
The company also announced a master collaboration agreement with Astellas Pharma, a research-and-development–driven pharmaceutical company headquartered in Japan, to develop and commercialize companion diagnostics paired with Astellas drugs for use in cancer and other diseases. Two initial projects in the collaboration focus on oncology and aim to pair Qiagen diagnostics with Astellas compounds in early-stage clinical trials: ASP5878, a fibroblast growth factor receptor inhibitor, and ASP8273, an EGFR inhibitor.
Qiagen, 240-686-7425