Sophia Genetics And Qiagen Forge Partnership To Combine Strengths In Next-generation Sequencing

SOPHiA GENETICS, a cloud-native software company in the healthcare space, announced a new partnership with QIAGEN N.V that will pair QIAseq reagent technology with the SOPHiA DDM platform to enhance tumor analysis through next-generation sequencing (NGS).

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“SOPHiA’s mission is to democratize data-driven medicine. To get there, we are partnering with reagent manufacturers so that our deep expertise in genomic analysis complements their solutions”

The partnership will allow customers to order QIAseq panels that can be processed through SOPHiA DDM™, a cloud-based platform that analyzes data from various sources to enable entirely new research perspectives. The partnership will initially support somatic variant detection (an alteration in DNA that occurs after birth) using QIAseq Targeted DNA Pro panels for homologous recombination repair (HRR), a special type of biomarker test to find tumors that have certain mutations that may make them sensitive to PARP inhibitors in oncology.

“SOPHiA’s mission is to democratize data-driven medicine. To get there, we are partnering with reagent manufacturers so that our deep expertise in genomic analysis complements their solutions,” said Kevin Puylaert, VP Business Development at SOPHiA GENETICS. “We have a strong and longstanding relationship with QIAGEN and have used their products as part of our ‘bundle solution’ for years. QIAGEN’s amplicon-targeted NGS technology has an outstanding reputation to be among the best. We are taking full advantage of the performance of both solutions in this collaboration and are very optimistic about the positive impact on medicine and research.”

“Our Platform Partnership Program will enable more customers to benefit from the high quality of the QIAGEN NGS preparation kits through the use of a wider range of analytics solutions to address their unique analysis and interpretation needs,” said Thomas Schweins, Senior Vice President of the Life Sciences Business Area at QIAGEN. “SOPHiA GENETICS is our first partner thanks to their deep and unique expertise and reputation. We look forward to offering our customers a combination of best-in-class solutions and expanding our collaboration.”

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The applications of SOPHiA DDM™ will support a wide range of applications using QIAGEN kits. The goal is to allow customers to use SOPHiA GENETICS’s Set-Up Program, an efficient and reliable process designed to establish and demonstrate the analytical performance of any test prior to it being carried out. This will enable customers to better and more efficiently design new workflows using QIAseq technologies.

The partnership with SOPHiA GENETICS is planned to be expanded to other areas of analysis, including the use of QIAseq panels custom-made solutions. It is the inaugural partnership in QIAGEN’s QIAseq Platform Partnership.

NGS has the potential to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of cancers and rare diseases but creates extremely large, complex, and noisy datasets for analysis. Without the right analytical technology, pinpointing causative variants and obtaining actionable insights from NGS data requires specialist skills, multiple resources, and considerable time. The SOPHiA DDM™ Platform uses machine learning with patented methods to efficiently call, annotate, and pre-classify variants from raw NGS data. User-friendly features streamline prioritization, simplify interpretation, and expedite reporting.

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