QIAGEN and Sentieon Partner to Advance Precision Medicine With Highly Efficient Variant-Calling Software

HILDEN, Germany & MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–QIAGEN N.V. and Sentieon, Inc. today announced a collaboration to advance precision medicine by delivering Sentieon’s award-winning software for calling variants as part of QIAGEN’s industry-leading bioinformatics portfolio, supporting thousands of next-generation sequencing (NGS) labs.

QIAGEN will offer customers Sentieon’s DNAseq and TNseq products for germline and somatic variant calling, integrated into CLC Genomics Workbench® for biomedical research and QIAGEN Clinical Insight® for routine laboratory testing, launching the expanded capabilities later this year. Used extensively in pharma biotech workflows, QIAGEN’s OmicSoft Array Server®solution for multi-omic data analysis and management already incorporates the Sentieon products, and QIAGEN also plans to integrate the tools into its solutions for large-scale population genomics.

The QIAGEN/Sentieon partnership provides powerful computing resources, lower costs and faster turnaround. This was recently illustrated during a project where nearly 12,000 whole exome and whole genome sequencing samples were processed from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) for inclusion in OmicSoft’s OncoLand collection of cancer datasets.

“As next-generation sequencing bridges from biomedical research into growing applications in precision medicine and population genomics, these Sentieon software tools will greatly enhance the value of QIAGEN’s Sample to Insight solutions. The software combines superb accuracy in germline and somatic variant calling with the highest efficiency, delivering 10 times the processing speed and lower computational costs than public algorithms,” said Dr. Frank Schacherer, Vice President Products and Solutions for QIAGEN Bioinformatics. “Integrating Sentieon’s DNAseq and TNseq tools into QIAGEN’s market-leading solutions will accelerate adoption of NGS for routine laboratory use, as well as enabling customers with national genome projects and large-scale pharma cohorts to efficiently analyze data on a population scale.”

“We are pleased to partner with QIAGEN, the world’s leader in commercial solutions for bioinformatics, in enabling precision data for precision medicine. Sentieon’s best-in-class tools will now be accessible to thousands of users who rely on QIAGEN to manage and analyze their NGS data,” said Dr. Jun Ye, President and Chief Executive Officer of Sentieon. “Integrating our solutions will give scientists user-friendly QIAGEN interfaces to run Sentieon’s tools and interpretation of variants based on the unparalleled QIAGEN Knowledge Base. QIAGEN’s global presence and comprehensive portfolio also creates an opportunity for Sentieon’s products to move to the next level of adoption in laboratories worldwide.”

The Sentieon software tools being added to CLC Genomics Workbench and QIAGEN Clinical Insight:

  • Sentieon DNAseq provides highly accurate, efficient variant calling for germline (or inherited) mutations. This genomic analysis tool implements the same mathematics used in the Broad Institute’s BWA-GATK HaplotypeCaller 3.x Best Practice Workflow pipeline, but without downsampling, providing state-of-the-art accuracy benchmarked to GATK results. More efficient computing algorithms and enterprise-strength software implementation make Sentieon’s DNAseq pipeline more than 10 times faster than the BWA-GATK pipeline on the same generic-CPU based hardware. The software also enables efficient joint calling on 100,000-plus samples simultaneously, saving time and effort.
  • Sentieon TNseq enables consistent, confident somatic variant detection from tumor-normal pairs with modes that can match either the Broad Institute’s industry-standard MuTect (calling SNV in somatic variants) or MuTect2 (calling both SNV and INDELs). Like Sentieon DNAseq’s matching of BWA-GATK, TNseq software has identical math to MuTect/MuTect2 but more efficient computing algorithms and no downsampling, making it more than 10 times faster and enabling enterprise-strength software implementation. This also enables high-coverage applications like liquid biopsies, processing regions with coverage depths of more than 100,000.

QIAGEN offers a portfolio of industry-leading bioinformatics solutions for the analysis, interpretation and reporting of biological data. CLC Genomics Workbench is a powerful solution, developed by scientists for scientists, to analyze and visualize next generation sequencing data. QIAGEN Clinical Insight (QCI) software is used by many clinical labs and enables any molecular pathology lab to quickly and confidently report the clinical relevance of somatic variants, the associated treatment options and clinical trials available to the oncologist. QIAGEN software draws upon the industry-leading QIAGEN Knowledge Base, a vast cloud-based repository of expertly curated and up-to-date content from peer-reviewed publications, clinical guidelines, drug information and clinical trials. For more information, please visit http://www.qiagenbioinformatics.com.

About Sentieon

Incorporated in July 2014, Sentieon develops and supplies a suite of bioinformatics secondary analysis tools that process genomics data with high computing efficiency, fast turnaround time, exceptional accuracy, and 100% consistency. Sentieon’s team develops highly-optimized algorithms for bioinformatics applications, using the team’s expertise in algorithm, software, and system optimization. Drawing on deep expertise in modeling, optimization, machine learning, and high-performance computing, we strive to enable precision data for precision medicine. Further information can be found at http://www.sentieon.com.

About QIAGEN

QIAGEN N.V., a Netherlands-based holding company, is the leading global provider of Sample to Insight solutions that enable customers to gain valuable molecular insights from samples containing the building blocks of life. Our sample technologies isolate and process DNA, RNA and proteins from blood, tissue and other materials. Assay technologies make these biomolecules visible and ready for analysis. Bioinformatics software and knowledge bases interpret data to report relevant, actionable insights. Automation solutions tie these together in seamless and cost-effective workflows. QIAGEN provides solutions to more than 500,000 customers around the world in Molecular Diagnostics (human healthcare), Applied Testing (forensics, veterinary testing and food safety), Pharma (pharma and biotech companies) and Academia (life sciences research). As of December 31, 2017, QIAGEN employed approximately 4,600 people in over 35 locations worldwide. Further information can be found at http://www.qiagen.com.